Alternate State Variables for Emerging Nanoelectronic Devices

Abstract

We provide an outlook of some important state variables for emerging nanoelectronic devices. State variables are physical representations of information used to perform information processing via memory and logic functionality. Advances in material science, emerging nanodevices, nanostructures, and architectures have provided hope that alternative state variables based on new mechanisms, nanomaterials, and nanodevices may indeed be plausible. We review and analyze the computational advantages that alternate state variables may possibly attain with respect to maximizing computational performance via minimum energy dissipation, maximum operating switching speed, and maximum device density.

Introduction

“…A comprehensive discussion on alternate state variables for emerging nanolectronic devices has been provided in [4]. Two approaches have been adopted in general by various research groups: One of them attempts to tackle the problem through new transistor-based devices.…”

A Material Framework for Beyond-CMOS Devices

“…Soon after in 2011, the US Federal government introduced the Material Genome Initiative (MGI) and in 2013 the federal government and the semiconductor industry founded the STARNet program, funding the Center of Excellence on Functional Accelerated nanoMaterials (FAME) with the mission to discover new functional materials for logic, memory, sensors and actuators. These include a better understanding of the limits of information processing [1], emerging memory and benchmarking [2], nanopatterning benchmarking [3], alternate state variables [4] and more recently beyond CMOS device benchmarking [5] [6]. However, a framework and methodology for emerging materials has been lacking and yet to be proposed.…”

Performance modeling for interconnects for conventional and emerging switches

“…Here, kB is the Boltzmann constant, and T is the operating temperature of the device. Non-conventional ways of storing and manipulating information encoded in the form of alternate state variables are currently being investigated [5]. A state variable refers to the physical representation of information.…”