Timing-driven placement for carbon nanotube circuits

Abstract

Carbon nanotube field effect transistors (CNFETs), which use carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as the transistor channel, are promising substitution of conventional CMOS technology. However, due to the stochastic assembly process of CNTs, the number of CNTs in each CNFET has a large variation, resulting in a vast circuit delay variation and timing yield degradation. To overcome it, we propose a timing-driven placement method for CNFET circuits. It exploits a unique feature of CNFET circuits, namely, asymmetric spatial correlation: CNFETs that lie along the CNT growth direction are highly correlated in terms of their electrical properties. Our method distributes CNFETs of the same critical paths to different rows perpendicular to the CNT growth direction during both global and detailed placement phases, while optimizing the timing of these critical paths. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach reduces both the mean and the variance of circuit delay, leading to an improvement in timing yield.