Design Automation for Field-coupled Nanotechnologies

This book discusses the main tasks of Design Automation for Field-coupled Nanocomputing (FCN) technologies, in order to enable large-scale composition of elementary building blocks, that obtain correct systems from given function specifications. To this end, a holistic design flow is described, which covers exact and scalable placement & routing, one-pass logic synthesis, novel clocking mechanisms for data synchronization, and formal verification for obtained circuit layouts. Additionally, theoretical groundwork is presented that lays the foundation for any algorithmic consideration in the future. Furthermore, an open-source FCN design framework called fiction, which contains implementations of all proposed techniques, is presented and made publicly available. The approaches discussed in this book address obstacles that have existed since the conceptualization of the FCN paradigm and could not be resolved since then. As a result, this book substantially advances the state of the artin design automation for FCN technologies.

Marcel Walter received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Bremen, Germany, in 2021 for his work on algorithms for the physical design of emerging post-CMOS nanotechnologies. As part of the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) 1320 “EASE – Everyday Activity Science and Engineering”, he also worked towards the verification of autonomous robotic agents in household scenarios. Furthermore, he is the initiator and maintainer of the fiction framework for the logic synthesis, physical design, and verification of Field-coupled Nanocomputing (FCN) circuits. He is going to continue his research work as a Postdoc at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Robert Wille is Full Professor at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, and Chief Scientific Officer at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Austria. He received the Diploma and Dr.-Ing. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Bremen, Germany, in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Since then, he worked at the University of Bremen, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the University of Applied Science of Bremen, the University of Potsdam, and the Technical University Dresden. Since 2015, he is working in Linz/Hagenberg. His research interests are in the design of circuits and systems for both conventional and emerging technologies. In these areas, he published more than 350 papers in journals and conferences and served in editorial boards and program committees of numerous journals/conferences such as TCAD, ASP-DAC, DAC, DATE, and ICCAD. For his research, he was awarded, e.g., with an ERC Consolidator Grant, Best Paper Awards, e.g., at TCAD and ICCAD, a DAC Under-40 Innovator Award, a Google Research Award, and more.

Frank Sill Torres received the Diploma and Dr.-Ing. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rostock, Germany, in 2002 and 2007, respectively. From 2007 to 2010, he was asPost-Doc at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. From 2010 to 2018, he was with the Department of Electronic Engineering at the UFMG as professor for Microelectronics. From 2018 to 2019, he was with the Cyber-Physical Systems group of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen as Senior Researcher. In 2019, he joined the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Bremerhaven, Germany, as the head of the Department for Resilience of Maritime Systems. His current research interests include Resilient Systems, Design for Reliability and Emerging Technologies. He was a member of several conference committees, including DATE, ISCAS, LATS and MWSCAS, Symposium chair SBCCI 2016 and 2, and he was an Associate Researcher of the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) from 2014 to 2020.

Rolf Drechsler received the Diploma and Dr. Phil. Nat. degrees in computer science from J.W. Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He was with the Institute of Computer Science, Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, from 1995 to 2000, and with the Corporate Technology Department, Siemens AG, Munich, Germany, from 2000 to 2001. Since October 2001, he has been with the University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany, where he is currently a Full Professor and the Head of the Group for Computer Architecture, Institute of Computer Science. In 2011, he additionally became the Director of the Cyber Physical Systems group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen. His current research interests include the development and design of data structures and algorithms with a focus on circuit and system design. He is an IEEE Fellow. Rolf Drechsler was a member of Program Committees of numerous conferences including e.g. DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, FDL, MEMOCODE, FMCAD, Symposiums Chair ISMVL 1999 and 2014, Symposium Chair ETS 2018, and the Topic Chair for “Formal Verification” DATE 2004, DATE 2005, DAC 2010, as well as DAC 2011. He received best paper awards at the Haifa Verification Conference (HVC) in 2006, the Forum on specification & Design Languages (FDL) in 2007 and 2010, the IEEE Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems (DDECS) in 2010 and the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in 2013. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, and further journals.