Assessment of CNTFET based circuit performance and robustness to PVT variations

Carbon NanoTubes (CNTs) have superior transport properties, excellent thermal conductivity, and high current handling capability; recently the CNT has been proposed as an alternative device technology to supersede CMOS. In this paper, the circuit-level performance of CNT-based FETs (CNTFETs) is initially compared to MOSFETs; simulation is performed for various logic gates and benchmark circuits to assess the sensitivity to PVT variations using the same minimum gate length. The simulation results show that the delay of CNTFET-based gates is about 10 times lower; moreover, the power delay product (PDP) and the leakage power of CNTFET-based gates are lower than MOSFET based gates by orders of magnitude. These orders of improvements in performance metrics are also achieved while attaining excellent robustness to process, voltage, and temperature variations.