Physical design of CNTFET-based circuits for yield improvement

Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistors (CNTFETs) have superior electrical properties and therefore they are promising candidates to replace silicon-based devices in near future. Despite recent approaches to remove metallic CNTs from the inherent mixture of chiralities, the circuits still suffer from this issue. In consequence, the CNTFET device performance is degraded which in turn impacts the circuit yield. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework to analyze the leakage power, delay, and the manufacturing yield of circuits in the presence of metallic CNTs. With the help of our framework, the effect of different factors such as the probability of metallic tubes and the cell layout on the performance metrics is investigated. Moreover, we propose a new layout structure for standard cells to improve the overall yield of the circuit by around 10%.