A low-voltage and energy-efficient full adder cell based on carbon nanotube technology (original) (raw)

Scaling problems and limitations of conventional silicon transistors have led the designers to exploit novel nano-technologies. One of the most promising and feasible nano-technologies is CNT (Carbon Nanotube) based transistors. In this paper, a high-speed and energy-efficient CNFET (Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistor) based Full Adder cell is proposed for nanotechnology. This design is simulated in various supply voltages, frequencies and load capacitors using HSPICE circuit simulator. Significant improvement is achieved in terms of speed and PDP (Power-Delay-Product) in comparison with other classical and state-of-the-art CMOS and CNFET-based designs, existing in the literature. The proposed Full Adder can also drive large load capacitance and works properly in low supply voltages. Citation: Keivan Navi, Rabe'e Sharifi Rad, Mohammad Hossein Moaiyeri and Amir Momeni, "A low-voltage and energy-efficient full adder cell based on carbon nanotube technology", Nano-Micro Lett. 2, 114-120 (2010). doi:10.5101/ nml.v2i2.p114-120 Scaling down the feature size of MOSFET devices in nanometer, leads to serious challenges, such as short channel effects, very high leakage power consumption and large parametric variations. Due to these limitations researchers become eager to work toward new emerging technologies such as Quantum Automata (QCA) [1], Nanowire transistors [2] and Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistors (CNFET) [3]. By the mentioned problems of nanoscale CMOS technology, which makes it unsuitable for low-power and low-voltage applications in the near future, these nano-devices could replace the conventional silicon MOSFET in the time to come. However, due to the similarities between the infrastructure and functionality of the conventional MOSFET devices with CNFETs and also because of the ballistic operation of CNFETs, it could be more promising and achievable, compared to other nano-devices. Recently some efforts have been done for designing circuits based on CNFET such as multiple valued logic circuits [4,5], arithmetic circuits [6] and so on, taking