A Logic Simplification Approach for Very Large Scale Crosstalk Circuit Designs

Crosstalk computing, involving engineered interference between nanoscale metal lines, offers a fresh perspective to scaling through co-existence with CMOS. Through capacitive manipulations and innovative circuit style, not only primitive gates can be implemented, but custom logic cells such as an Adder, Subtractor can be implemented with huge gains. Our simulations show over 5x density and 2x power benefits over CMOS custom designs at 16nm [1]. This paper introduces the Crosstalk circuit style and a key method for large-scale circuit synthesis utilizing existing EDA tool flow. We propose to manipulate the CMOS synthesis flow by adding two extra steps: conversion of the gate-level netlist to Crosstalk implementation friendly netlist through logic simplification and Crosstalk gate mapping, and the inclusion of custom cell libraries for automated placement and layout. Our logic simplification approach first converts Cadence generated structured netlist to Boolean expressions and then uses the majority synthesis tool to obtain majority functions, which is further used to simplify functions for Crosstalk friendly implementations. We compare our approach of logic simplification to that of CMOS and majority logic-based approaches. Crosstalk circuits share some similarities to majority synthesis that are typically applied to Quantum Cellular Automata technology. However, our investigation shows that by closely following Crosstalk's core circuit styles, most benefits can be achieved. In the best case, our approach shows 36% density improvements over majority synthesis for MCNC benchmark

Test of a majority-based reversible (quantum) 4 bits ripple-carry adder in adiabatic calculation

Quantum computing and circuits are of growing interest and so is reversible logic as it plays an important role in the synthesis of circuits dedicated to quantum computation. Moreover, reversible logic provides an alternative to classical computing machines, that may overcome many of the power dissipation problems in the near future. As a proof of concept we designed and tested a reversible 4 bits ripple-carry adder based on a do-spy-undo structure. This paper presents some performances obtained with such a chip processed in standard 0.35 μm CMOS technology and used in real reversible calculation (in this study, computations are performed in both directions such that addition and subtraction are made reversibly with the same chip). We also discuss the superiority of using adiabatic signals over classical rectangular pulses when using dual-line pass-transistor logic gates. Adiabatic signals allow the signal energy stored on the various capacitances of the circuit to be redistributed rather than being dissipated as heat. Finally, we show that adiabatic signals allow to avoid calculation errors introduced by the use of conventional rectangular pulses and allow to drastically reduce the number of pulse resynchronization in large circuits. Index Terms—reversible computation, design, implementation, pass-transistor logic, ripple-carry adder, Spectre simulation, quantum computation, adiabatic signal, test and measuremen

Open-ended evolution to discover analogue circuits for beyond conventional applications

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10710-012-9163-8. Copyright @ Springer 2012.Analogue circuits synthesised by means of open-ended evolutionary algorithms often have unconventional designs. However, these circuits are typically highly compact, and the general nature of the evolutionary search methodology allows such designs to be used in many applications. Previous work on the evolutionary design of analogue circuits has focused on circuits that lie well within analogue application domain. In contrast, our paper considers the evolution of analogue circuits that are usually synthesised in digital logic. We have developed four computational circuits, two voltage distributor circuits and a time interval metre circuit. The approach, despite its simplicity, succeeds over the design tasks owing to the employment of substructure reuse and incremental evolution. Our findings expand the range of applications that are considered suitable for evolutionary electronics

Microarchitecture optimization for timing and layout

In recent years the drive to produce more complex integrated circuits while spending less design time has driven the demand for design automation tools. The search for design automation methods has resulted in the design of numerous behavioral synthesis and logic synthesis tools. This report describes a system that fills the gap between traditional behavioral synthesis and logic synthesis tools. Techniques are introduced for improving the microarchitecture structure and using feedback from lower-level optimization tools to guide design optimizations while attempting to meet user specified area and time constraints. These techniques include the capability for mixing layout styles such as custom layout for random-logic components and bit-slicing for regularly structured components. In this manner the entire design, control logic and datapath, can be optimized at the same time. Further, this paper presents a new methodology for microarchitecture-level optimization that greatly reduces the amount of technology-specific knowledge necessary to perform the optimizations

A bibliography on digital computer-aided circuit analysis and design

Digital computer-aided electric logic circuit analysis and design bibliograph