Nanotechnology::
  Nanotechnology

Chemically-Assembled Electronic Nanotechnology

Chemically Assembled Electronic Nanotechnology (CAEN) is a form of electronic nanotechnology which uses self-alignment to construct electronic circuits out of nanometer-scale devices that take advantage of quantum-mechanical effects. CAEN can be harnessed to create useful computational devices with more than 1010 gate-equivalents per cm2.
 

Chemists and physicists already have assembled molecular-scale electronic devices and, everyday, research is producing new ones, with better properties. 
 
 
 
 
 

Researchers have also devised an electrical switch which can be built from a single molecule. This switch can be configured (opened/closed) by applying a high electric field, outside the normal operating range. It stores the configuration for a relatively long time (minutes). In the conducive state it behaves like a diode. 
 
 
 
 


 
 

It is possible to cross nanowires and place configurable switches at the junctions. 
 
 


 
 
 

Large quantities of molecular wires and switches can be inexpensively created using the process of self-assembly. 


The Holy Grail of electronic nanotechnology today is the manufacturing of transistors on a large scale. We claim that such an effort is futile: even if transistors can, and have been built at the nanoscale, it is virtually impossible to connect them with wires: at the nanoscale the required alignment simply cannot be obtained using a massively parallel fabrication technology.
Nanotechnology on large scale offers us only two-terminal devices.


 

By using complementary logic and only diodes and resistors it is possible to implement a set of complete logical functions. This example shows the implementation of an and gate using diode-resistor logic. 
    To obtain signal amplification and clocking, our research group has devised a molecular latch which can be built at the nanoscale using only two-terminal devices. 
 
 

  Unlike CMOS, CAEN is extremely unlikely to be used to construct complex aperiodic structures. We introduce an architecture based on fabricating dense regular structures, which we call nanoBlocks, that can be programmed after fabrication to implement complex functions. In our proposal nanoBlocks implement three-input to three-output logic functions. We call an array of connected nanoBlocks a nanoFabric. 
 

Compared to CMOS, CAEN-based devices have a higher defect density. Such circuits will thus require built-in defect tolerance. A natural method of handling defects is to first configure the nanoFabric for self-diagnosis and then to implement the desired functionality by configuring around the defects. Reconfigurabilty is thus integral to the operation of the nanoFabric. Their nature makes nanoFabrics particularly well suited for reconfigurable computing. 

Motivation

Our research rests on the following premises: 

  • Electronic nanotechnology can build extremely dense and low power computational elements. 
  • We will soon be able to manufacture devices with 1 billion logic gates or even more. 
  • Conventional microarchitecture has problems handling the increasing complexity of the designs. 

The architecture we propose has better scaling properties than CMOS-based devices, and will be able to smoothly take advantage of the increasing number of hardware resources.

Problem Solution
The verification and testing costs escalate dramatically with each new hardware generation. The fixed computation core is a very large and homogeneous reconfigurable fabric. Testing and verification for such a simple device is trivial. We do not have a universal interpreter, which is complex hardware structure (i.e., a CPU).
Manufacturing costs (both plant costs and non-recurring engineering costs) have skyrocketed. The same masks are used to manufacture all the reconfigurable devices; all complex processing is done in software, post-fabrication.
The shrinking feature size will make the defect density control very expensive; in the near future we will be unable to manufacture large, defect-free integrated circuits. Reconfigurable hardware architecture can utilize substrates with very high defect densities; the identical nature of the computational elements makes possible the reconfiguration around the fabric defects.
The dissipated power density (watts/mm2) of state-of-the-art microprocessors has already reached values that make air-cooling infeasible. We synthesize the program into a collection of small circuits, only one of which is actively switching at any time moment. Thus power consumption is dramatically reduced.
The clock frequency has increased to a value where global signals across the entire chip are infeasible (the propagation delay exceeds the clock cycle). Clock signal distribution often takes more than 50% of the power consumption. We translate the program into a series of circuits which have only local signals. Any remote communication is made using a pipelined communication channel. Moreover, our circuits can be implemented using asynchronous logic, which do not require a clock signal at all.
The number of exceptions generated by the CAD tools requiring manual intervention grows quickly with design complexity. Placing and routing on a reconfigurable hardware substrate is substantially simpler than handling CMOS.
Today's processors use extremely complicated hardware structures to enable the exploitation of the instruction-level parallelism (ILP) in large windows; however, the sustained performance is rather low. The compiler synthesizes hardware tailored to each application; the amount of parallelism exactly matches what the compiler can extract.