Energy efficient high speed CNFET based interconnect drivers for FPGAS

Carbon nanotube field effect transistors (CNFETs) are already competitive in some respects with state-of-art silicon transistors, and are promising candidates for future nano-electronic devices. The ability of CNFET for using high K-dielectric provides high insulator capacitance which improves the gate control and also lowers gate leakage. This paper proposes new energy efficient CNFETs based drivers operating in the ballistic mode, for the routing interconnects of FPGAs. HSPICE simulation based on BPTM (Berkeley predictive technology model) for 32 nm channel length device at operating frequency of 500 MHz shows that the scaled CNFETs drivers provides very good performance even at lower supply voltage for interconnect length of 1000 um. The paper shows that the different schemes of CNFETs based optimized-drivers operating at VDD=0.3 v are more energy efficient than the driver operating on VDD=0.9 v.