Ultra low power/energy SET-based axon-inspired communication

Power consumption has been recognized as a grand challenge for nano-electronics. With continuous scaling, wires (much more than devices) are going to be the ones (almost entirely) determining dynamic power. That is why innovations in classical (i.e., based-on-wires) communication as well as radical (i.e., beyond-wire) solutions are called upon to tackle this challenge. One source of inspiration is expected to be the brain, and in particular the neurons themselves as they are able to communicate at reasonably large distances (compared to their size) on a very limited power budget (dendritic and axonal communications). This paper builds on very recent results analyzing axon-inspired communications as dense lattices of locally connected ion channels. In this paper we try to emulate the logical functioning of a voltage-gated ion channel using single-electron technology/transistors (SETs). Such an approach should in principle lead to practical power/energy lower bounds for nanoelectronics.