The Future of Integrated Circuits: A Survey of Nanoelectronics

While most of the electronics industry is dependent on the ever-decreasing size of lithographic transistors, this scaling cannot continue indefinitely. Nanoelectronics (circuits built with components on the scale of 10 nm) seem to be the most promising successor to lithographic based ICs. Molecular-scale devices including diodes, bistable switches, carbon nanotubes, and nanowires have been fabricated and characterized in chemistry labs. Techniques for self-assembling these devices into different architectures have also been demonstrated and used to build small-scale prototypes. While these devices and assembly techniques will lead to nanoscale electronics, they also have the drawback of being prone to defects and transient faults. Fault-tolerance techniques will be crucial to the use of nanoelectronics. Lastly, changes to the software tools that support the fabrication and use of ICs will be needed to extend them to support nanoelectronics. This paper introduces nanoelectronics and reviews the current progress made in research in the areas of technologies, architectures, fault tolerance, and software tools.