21st International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSI Design 2008)
Fault-Tolerant Computing Using a Hybrid Nano-CMOS Architecture
Hyderabad, India
January 04-January 08
ISBN: 0-7695-3083-4
Architectures based on nanoscale molecular devices are at- tracting attention for replacing CMOS architectures at the end of the semiconductor roadmap. The two most promising nan- otechnologies, according to ITRS, are silicon nanowires and carbon nanotubes. Although they offer unmatched densities for building logic, interconnect and memory, they suffer from very defect-prone manufacturing processes. This is further ex- acerbated by testing complexities where it is nearly impossible to detect all defects in a large nanoscale chip. Furthermore, the small structures in nanoscale architectures are susceptible to transient faults which can produce arbitrary soft errors. As a result, fault tolerance is necessary to make nanoscale archi- tectures practical and realistic. We propose an architecture that can tolerate a large number of undetected manufacturing faults as well as a large rate of transient faults. Our archi- tecture is characterized by multiple levels of redundancy and majority voting to correct errors caused by such faults. A key aspect of the architecture is that it contains a judicious balance of both nanoscale and traditional CMOS components. A com- panion to the architecture is a compiler with heuristics tailored to quickly and compactly map logic onto partially defective components. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the architecture.
Citation:
Muzaffer O. Simsir, Srihari Cadambi, Franjo Ivancic, Martin Roetteler, Niraj K. Jha, "Fault-Tolerant Computing Using a Hybrid Nano-CMOS Architecture," vlsid, pp.435-440, 21st International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSI Design 2008), 2008