A Voltage Controlled Nano Addressing Circuit

Bao Liu
UTSA


Abstract

Nanoelectronic systems are expected to be based on bottom-up self-assembly manufacturing technologies and regular reconfigurable (e.g., crossbar) structures. An outstanding challenge for realizing nanoelectronic systems is how to address a nanoscale wire (e.g., a carbon nanotube) in an array. Existing nano addressing methods are based on implementation of binary decoders of precise layout design, which is highly unlikely at nanometer scale. This paper proposes a voltage controlled nano addressing circuit, which relies on continously tunable external address voltages to address a nanoscale wire in an array. The proposed nano addressing circuit not only improves yield and enables aggressive scaling with no requirement of precise layout design, but also is adaptive to and more robust in the presence of process variations which are expected to be prevalent in nanoelectronic designs. Precision of addressing is provided by the current-to-voltage sensitivity of the transistors in the circuit and by the external address voltages. SPICE simulation based on compact CNFET models proves the effectiveness of the proposed circuit, and evaluate its performance in term of addressing resolution.