Defect tolerance in resistor-logic demultiplexers for nanoelectronics. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Since defect rates are expected to be high in nanocircuitry, we analyse the performance of resistor-based demultiplexers in the presence of defects. The defects observed to occur in fabricated nanoscale crossbars are stuck-open, stuck-closed, stuck-short, broken-wire, and adjacent-wire-short defects. We analyse the distribution of voltages on the nanowire output lines of a resistor-logic demultiplexer, based on an arbitrary constant-weight code, when defects occur. These analyses show that resistor-logic demultiplexers can tolerate small numbers of stuck-closed, stuck-open, and broken-wire defects on individual nanowires, at the cost of some degradation in the circuit's worst-case voltage margin. For stuck-short and adjacent-wire-short defects, and for nanowires with too many defects of the other types, the demultiplexer can still achieve error-free performance, but with a smaller set of output lines. This design thus has two layers of defect tolerance: the coding layer improves the yield of usable output lines, and an avoidance layer guarantees that error-free performance is achieved.

published proceedings

  • Nanotechnology

author list (cited authors)

  • Kuekes, P. J., Robinett, W., & Williams, R. S.

citation count

  • 8

complete list of authors

  • Kuekes, Philip J||Robinett, Warren||Williams, R Stanley

publication date

  • May 2006