The continuous scaling of CMOS circuits has set the MOSFET transistor in the nanoelectronic era. In this context, the functionality and complexity of integrated circuits (ICs) are growing up. However, the operation voltage has been continuously reduced. The higher complexity of ICs has allowed including electronic systems in a lot of safety critical applications (i.e., automotive, aeronautics a...

by Timothy J. Dysart Much has been written and predicted about the demise of Moore’s law in advancing computing technology. While many of these predictions have fallen by the wayside, the end may be approaching since the ”red brick wall” (areas where scaling progress may end if breakthroughs are not identified) is barely being pushed further into the future. As a result, numerous nanoelectronic...

The fast development of plasmonics have greatly advanced our understanding to the abundant phenomena related to surface plamon polaritons (SPPs) and improved our ability to manipulate light at the nanometer scale. With tightly confi ned local fi eld, SPPs can be transmitted in waveguides of subwavelength dimensions. Nanophotonic circuits built with plasmonic elements can be scaled down to dimen...

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is a newly-developed nanotechnology for next-generation nanoelectronic circuits. QCA circuits use the propagation of charge polarity in QCA cells to pass information without any current being involved. It has the advantages of extremely small size, low power consumption, high device density and twinkling operation process. Nanofabrication of QCA circuits may ...

The prolonged and aggressive nature of scaling to augment the performance of silicon integrated circuits (ICs) and the technical challenges and costs associated with this has led to the study of alternative materials that can use processing schemes analogous to semiconductor manufacturing. We examine the status of recent efforts to develop active device elements using nontraditional lithography...

Electric programmability has been the basis for decades of advances in integrated computer component performance. However, once fabricated or assembled, such components—whether blade servers in a data center or microprocessors on a circuit board—are typically stuck in place and require human intervention for reconfiguration, removal, or replacement. For continued advances at the architectural l...

Brillouin light scattering (BLS) and picosecond laser ultrasonics (PLU) are two noncontact optical techniques that have garnered significant interest for thin film elastic constant measurements. PLU and BLS measurements were utilized to determine the elastic constants of 100 to 500 nm thick nanoporous low-k dielectric materials of significant interest for reducing capacitive delays in nanoelect...

As CMOS technology enters the nanoelectronics realm (tens of nanometres and below), where quantum mechanical effects start to prevail, conventional CMOS devices are meeting many technological challenges for further scaling. This situation has motivated the emergence of a variety of new nanoelectronic devices [1] [2]. However, as new generations of nanodevices are developed, we become less famil...

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) are an emerging technology and a possible alternative for faster speed, smaller size, and low power consumption than semiconductor transistor based technologies. Previously, adder designs based on conventional designs were examined for implementation with QCA technology. This paper utilizes the QCA characteristics to design a fault-tolerant adder that is more...