Designing high-speed and energy-efficient dynamic comparators using complementary carbon nanotube field-effect transistors

Abstract

Carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFETs) are considered the most promising candidate to replace silicon-based devices. In this study, a Strong-ARM dynamic comparator designed with complementary CNFETs was simulated. The circuit delay and energy efficiency were obtained under conditions of small and large signal inputs. Compared with the silicon-based circuit, the speed of the CNFET-based comparator improved by up to 81.6% for the same technology node, whereas the energy-delay product improved by more than one order of magnitude. This study demonstrated the great potential of CNFETs for comparator applications, which can help achieve high-performance analog-to-digital converters or memory readout circuits.