Physical design and testing of Nano Magnetic architectures

Nano-Magnetic Logic (NML) is a promising candidate to substitute CMOS technology since it is characterized by very low power consumption and it can combine computation and memory in the same device. Several works analyze this technology at device level; nevertheless a higher level analysis is required to fully understand its potentials. It is actually fundamental to analyze how an architecture of realistic complexity can be really implemented taking into account the physical limits due to technology, and which performance it could consequently reach. We present here a physical design and test methodology based on our tool ToPoliNano, which allows analyzing circuits using models specifically targeted for this technology. We developed an automatic engine for placing and routing combinational NML circuits including as constraints realistic rules due to currently available fabrication processes. After the place and route phase, ToPoliNano also allows to perform a circuit logical simulation, detailed at the single nanomagnet level. Furthermore this tool has the ability to analyze and test circuits based on NML, considering the impact that process variations and faults have on the logical behavior of the circuit.