A short review of nanoelectronic architectures

In nanoelectronics the search for a successor to CMOS technology has so far mainly been concentrated on nanodevices that could eventually be made much smaller than CMOS transistors, perhaps even brought down to the ultimate limit of the molecular scale. Much less effort has been invested in examining the architectural problems that will also have to be solved. These problems range from the device level up to the full circuit level, and they involve many different factors. The question of how much extra performance will be gained by going to new nanoscale devices is fundamentally linked to these architectural issues. This short review concentrates on recent work that has been done on architectures in nanoelectronics and includes topics such as the system dependent relation between performance and power dissipation, the applicability of concepts of parallelism and fault tolerance, and the design and fabrication of large circuits.