Late Breaking Results: Physical Co-Design for Field-Coupled Nanocomputing

Field-coupled Nanocomputing (FCN), a class of post-CMOS technologies operating at the nanoscale without the flow of electricity, is becoming a reality due to advancements in simulating and manufacturing logic gates using Silicon Dangling Bonds (SiDBs). Efficient physical design methodologies are crucial for the performance, area efficiency, reliability, and manufacturability of FCN circuits. However, despite considerable progress in developing algorithms and tools tailored to FCN physical design, achieving efficient results still requires a co-design approach, necessitating expert manual refinement similar to the CMOS design process. To this end, we introduce a GUI-based tool that combines both automation and expert adjustments, enabling designers to easily optimize and modify FCN layouts. To demonstrate its potential, a designer used the tool to reduce the area of the best-known layout for the benchmark circuit cm82a by over 15 % in less than a minute. Additionally, the tool is publicly available as open-source at https://github.com/cda-tum/mnt-designer.