Ultra low power NEMFET based logic

In this paper, we introduce a Nano-Electro-Mechanical Field Effect Transistor (NEMFET) based logic family tailored to the implementation of low speed and ultra low energy functional units and processors. Basic Boolean gates implemented with NEMFETs only are analysed and compared against equivalent CMOS realisations. Our simulations suggest that the proposed short-circuit current free NEMFET gates exhibit up to 10x dynamic energy reduction and up to 2 orders of magnitude less leakage, at the expense of 10 to 20x slower operation, when compared with CMOS counterparts. We also analyse the fan-in influence on gate performance and observe that NEMFET the gate energy advantage increases with fan-in. Finally, we consider a 3D-Stacked hybrid NEMFET-CMOS computation platform running a heartbeat rate monitor application and demonstrate that NEMFET based logic is an enabling factor for the implementation of “zero-energy” operated systems.