Wave pipelining for majority-based beyond-CMOS technologies

The performance of some emerging nanotechnologies benefits from wave pipelining. The design of such circuits requires new models and algorithms. Thus we show how Majority-Inverter Graphs (MIG) can be used for this purpose and we extend the related optimization algorithms. The resulting designs have increased throughput, something that has traditionally been a weak point for the majority of non-charge-based technologies. We benchmark the algorithm on MIG netlists with three different technologies, Spin Wave Devices (SWD), Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA), and NanoMagnetic Logic (NML). We find that the wave pipelined version of the netlists have an improvement in throughput over power of 23×, 13×, and 5× for SWD, QCA, and NML, respectively. In terms of throughput over area ratio, the improvement is 5×, 8×, and 3×, respectively.