Design automation for hybrid CMOS-nanoelectronics crossbars

We developed the first automatic design system targeting a promising hybrid CMOS-Nanoelectronics Architecture called CMOL [5]. The CMOL architecture uses NOR gates to implement combinational logic. In this hybrid CMOS-nanoelectronics architecture, logical functions and the interconnections share the nanoelectronics hardware resource. Towards automating the CMOL physical design process, we developed a model for the CMOL architecture, formulated the placement and routing problems for the CMOL architecture subject to the unique CMOL specific constraints, and solved it by combining a placement algorithm with a gate assignment algorithm in a loop. We validated the proposed approach by implementing several industrial strength designs.