Publikation
Ignore Clocking Constraints: An Alternative Physical Design Methodology for Field-coupled Nanotechnologies
Robert Wille; Marcel Walter; Frank Sill Torres; Daniel Große; Rolf Drechsler
In: IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI) 2019. IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI-2019), July 15-17, Miami, Florida, USA, 2019.
Zusammenfassung
Field-Coupled Nanocomputing(FCN) allows for con-ducting computations with a power consumption that is magni-tudes below current CMOS technologies. Recent physical imple-mentations confirmed these prospects and put pressure on theElectronic Design Automation(EDA) community to develop physi-cal design methods comparable to those available for conventionalcircuits. While the major design task boils down to a place androute problem, certain characteristics of FCN circuits introducefurther challenges in terms of dedicated clock arrangementswhich lead to rather cumbersome clocking constraints. Thus far,those constraints have been addressed in a rather unsatisfactoryfashion only.In this work, we propose a physical design methodology whichtackles this problem by simply ignoring the clocking constraintsand using adjusted conventional place and route algorithms.In order to deal with the resulting ramifications, a dedicatedsynchronization elementis introduced. Results extracted froma physics simulator confirm the feasibility of the approach. Aproof of concept implementation illustrates that ignoring clockingconstraints indeed allows for a promising alternative directionfor FCN design that overcomes the obstacles preventing thedevelopment of efficient solutions thus far.