Exploring Standard-Cell Designs for Reconfigurable Nanotechnologies: A Formal Approach

Standard-cell design has always been a craft, and common field-effect transistors span only a small design space. This has changed with reconfigurable transistors. Boolean functions that exhibit multiple dual product-terms in their sum-of-product form yield various beneficial circuit implementations with recon-figurable transistors. In this work, we present an approach to automatically generate these implementations through a formal modeling approach. Using the 3-input XOR function as an example, we discuss the variations and show how to quantify properties like worst-case delay and power dissipation, as well as averages of delay and energy consumption per operation over different scenarios. The quantification runs fully automated on charge transport network models employing probabilistic model checking. This yields exact results instead of approximations obtained from experiments and sampling. The highlight of our work is that the proposed approach provides a comprehensive early technology evaluation flow.