Electronic Design Automation for Emerging Technologies

The continued scaling of horizontal and vertical physical features of silicon-based complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistors, termed as “More Moore”, has a limited runway and would eventually be replaced with “Beyond CMOS” technologies. There has been a tremendous effort to follow Moore’s law but it is currently approaching atomistic and quantum mechanical physics boundaries. This has led to active research in other non-CMOS technologies such as memristive devices, carbon nanotube field-effect transistors, quantum computing, etc. Several of these technologies have been realized on practical devices with promising gains in yield, integration density, runtime performance, and energy efficiency. Their eventual adoption is largely reliant on the continued research of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools catering to these specific technologies. Indeed, some of these technologies present new challenges to the EDA research community, which are being addressed through a series of innovative tools and techniques. In this tutorial, we will particularly cover the two phases of EDA flow, logic synthesis, and technology mapping, for two types of emerging technologies, namely, in-memory computing and quantum computing.