Design Automation for Field-coupled Nanotechnologies

Book excerpt: This book discusses the main tasks of Design Automation for Field-coupled Nanocomputing (FCN) technologies, in order to enable large-scale composition of elementary building blocks, that obtain correct systems from given function specifications. To this end, a holistic design flow is described, which covers exact and scalable placement & routing, one-pass logic synthesis, novel clocking mechanisms for data synchronization, and formal verification for obtained circuit layouts. Additionally, theoretical groundwork is presented that lays the foundation for any algorithmic consideration in the future. Furthermore, an open-source FCN design framework called fiction, which contains implementations of all proposed techniques, is presented and made publicly available. The approaches discussed in this book address obstacles that have existed since the conceptualization of the FCN paradigm and could not be resolved since then. As a result, this book substantially advances the state of the art in design automation for FCN technologies.