Hybrid Graphene Nanoribbon-CMOS tunneling volatile memory fabric

Graphene exhibits extraordinary electrical properties and is therefore often envisioned to be the candidate material for post-silicon era as Silicon technology approaches fundamental scaling limits. Various Graphene based electronic devices and interconnects have been proposed in the past. In this paper, we explore the possibility of a hybrid fabric between CMOS and Graphene by implementing a novel Graphene Nanoribbon crossbar (xGNR) based volatile Tunneling RAM (GNT RAM) and integrating it with the 3D CMOS stack and layout. Detailed evaluation of GNT RAM circuits proposed show that they have considerable advantages in terms of power, area and write performance over 16nm CMOS SRAM. This work opens up other possibilities including multi-state memory fabrics and even an all-graphene fabric can be envisioned on the long term.