Wave Pipelining for Majority-based Beyond-CMOS Technologies

O. Zografos1,2, A. De Meester2, E. Testa3, M. Soeken3, P.-E. Gaillardon4, G. De Micheli3, L. Amarú5, P. Raghavan1, F. Catthoor1,2, R. Lauwereins1,2
1imec, Kapeldreef 75, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium
2KU Leuven, ESAT, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium
3Integrated Systems Laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland
4Laboratory for NanoIntegrated Systems, University of Utah, UT, USA
5Synopsys Inc., Sunnyvale CA, USA

ABSTRACT


The performance of some emerging nanotechnologies benefits from wave pipelining. The design of such circuits requires new models and algorithms. Thus we show how Majority-Inverter Graphs (MIG) can be used for this purpose and we extend the related optimization algorithms. The resulting designs have increased throughput, something that has traditionally been a weak point for the majority of non-charge-based technologies. We benchmark the algorithm on MIG netlists with three different technologies, Spin Wave Devices (SWD), Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA), and NanoMagnetic Logic (NML). We find that the wave pipelined version of the netlists have an improvement in throughput over power of 23x;, 13x;, and 5x; for SWD, QCA, and NML, respectively. In terms of throughput over area ratio, the improvement is 5x, 8x;, and 3x, respectively.



Full Text (PDF)