A staircase structure for scalable and efficient synthesis of memristor-aided logic

The identification of the memristor as fourth fundamental circuit element and, eventually, its fabrication in the HP labs provide new capabilities for in-memory computing. While there already exist sophisticated methods for realizing logic gates with memristors, mapping them to crossbar structures (which can easily be fabricated) still constitutes a challenging task. This is particularly the case since several (complementary) design objectives have to be satisfied, e.g. the design method has to be scalable, should yield designs requiring a low number of timesteps and utilized memristors, and a layout should result that is hardly skewed. However, all solutions proposed thus far only focus on one of these objectives and hardly address the other ones. Consequently, rather imperfect solutions are generated by state-of-the-art design methods for memristor-aided logic thus far. In this work, we propose a corresponding automatic design solution which addresses all these design objectives at once. To this end, a staircase structure is utilized which employs an almost square-like layout and remains perfectly scalable while, at the same time, keeps the number of timesteps and utilized memristors close to the minimum. Experimental evaluations confirm that the proposed approach indeed allows to satisfy all design objectives at once.