Ultralow-power reconfigurable computing with complementary nano-electromechanical carbon nanotube switches

In recent years, several alternative devices have been proposed to deal with inherent limitation of conventional CMOS devices in terms of scalability at nanometer scale geometry. The fabrication and integration cost of these devices, however, have been prohibitive and/or the devices do not allow smooth transition from the conventional design paradigm. To address some of these limitations, we have developed a new family of devices called "Complementary Nano Electro-Mechanical Switches" (CNEMS) using carbon nanotubes as active switching/latching elements. The basic structure of these devices consists of three co-planar carbon nanotubes arranged so that the central nanotube can touch the two side carbon nanotubes upon application of a voltage pulse between them. Owing to the unique properties of carbon nanotubes, these devices have very low leakage current, low operation voltages, and have built-in energy storage to reduce computation power, resulting in very low overall power dissipation. CNEMS have stable on-off state and latching mechanism for non-volatile memory-mode operation. Besides, the devices can be readily integrated in the same substrate as CMOS transistors with high integration densities - thus, allowing easy manufacturability and hybridization with conventional CMOS devices. In this paper, we present the properties of these devices and based on our analysis, we propose a reconfigurable computation framework using these devices. For the first time, we demonstrate that these devices are promising in dynamically reconfigurable instant-on system development with about 25X lower power dissipation.