Towards An Ultra-Low-Power Architecture Using Single-Electron Tunneling Transistors

Minimizing power consumption is vitally important in embedded system design; power consumption determines battery lifespan. Ultra- low-power designs may even permit embedded systems to operate without batteries, e.g., by scavenging energy from the environment. Moreover, managing power dissipation is now a key factor in integrated circuit packaging and cooling. As a result, embedded system price, size, weight, and reliability are all strongly dependent on power dissipation. Recent developments in nanoscale devices open new alternatives for low-power embedded system design. Among these, single-electron tunneling transistors (SETs) hold the promise of achieving the lowest power consumption. However, SETs impose unique design constraints that strongly influence architectural and circuit-level decisions. Unfortunately, most analysis of SETs has focused on single devices instead of architectures, making it difficult to determine whether they are appropriate for low-power embedded systems. This article presents possible uses of SETs in high-performance and battery-powered embedded system design. The resulting fault-tolerant, hybrid SET/CMOS, reconfigurable architecture can be tailored to specific requirements and allows trade-offs among power consumption, performance, operation temperature, fabrication cost, and reliability. This work is a first step in evaluating the system-level potential of reducing power consumption by using SETs.