On-the-fly Defect-Aware Design of Circuits based on Silicon Dangling Bond Logic

Silicon Dangling Bonds (SiDBs) have emerged as a promising post-CMOS technology for achieving ultra-low power dissipation, establishing themselves as a highly anticipated and environmentally friendly competitor in the realm beyond conventional CMOS. To support the SiDB logic framework, design automation approaches have rapidly evolved. However, at the atomic scale of SiDBs, material imperfections pose a significant roadblock in scaling these devices. Consequently, es-tablished design automation flows, which are defect-agnostic, are inadequate and have not kept pace with the latest experimental findings and advances in fabrication capabilities. A first attempt was recently proposed that extends established defect-agnostic physical design methods by rudimentary defect-aware capabilities. While promising at first glance, in this work, we show that this first attempt yields unsatisfactory results. Subsequently, we present a novel approach that automatically designs a tailored SiDB gate on-the-fly whenever an SiDB gate encounters atomic defects in its vicinity, thereby incorporating these atomic defects into its layout as an integral part. Our experimental evaluations confirm that the proposed approach is capable of designing SiDB circuits of significant complexity and size, even in the presence of atomic defects for the first time. Therefore, this work contributes to advancing this promising post-CMOS technology.