Design of latches and flip-flops using emerging tunneling devices

Tunneling field-effect transistors (TFETs) stand out among novel device technologies for low-power circuits and systems. While some TFETs exhibits behavior similar to MOSFETs, a group of emerging tunneling devices including symmetric tunneling FETs (SymFETs) and interlayer tunnel FETs (IFETs) demonstrate a bell-shaped I-V characteristic dissimilar to that of MOSFETs. They have shown the potential for image processing and nontraditional computing in analog applications and the design of Boolean gates with SymFETs has also been explored. This paper uses a SymFET as a proxy to design sequential circuits comprised of devices with bell-shaped I-V characteristics. Said circuits are essential as practically any application requires the indefinite storage of data and control modules during computation. We show that the negative differential resistance (NDR) behavior of SymFET transistors can be employed to build compact and low power latches and flip-flops. The relationship of SymFET with another well-known tunneling device, namely resonant tunneling diode (RTD), is investigated. We illustrate how previous research on RTD-based circuits - such as monostable-bistable (MOBILE) self-latching circuits and highly compact MOBILE-based D flip-flop circuits - can be adopted to SymFETs. Our paper provides a novel path of circuit designs based on devices that have characteristics similar to SymFETs and shows that SymFETs are a promising option for image processing applications in terms of power and area.