A Global Routing Method for Graphene Nanoribbons Based Circuits and Interconnects

Abstract

With extreme miniaturization of traditional CMOS devices in deep sub-micron design levels, the delay of a circuit, as well as power dissipation and area are dominated by interconnections between logic blocks. Interconnect today is causing major problems such as delay, power dissipation, and so on. In an attempt to search for alternative materials, Graphene nanoribbons have been found to be potential for both transistors and interconnects due to its outstanding electrical and thermal properties. Graphene nanoribbons provide better options as materials used for global routing trees in VLSI circuits. However, certain special characteristics of Graphene nanoribbon prohibit direct application of existing VLSI routing tree construction methods. In this article, we address this issue and propose heuristic methods for construction of Graphene nanoribbon--based minimum hybrid cost and minimum-delay Steiner trees. We compute the delays for the trees using Elmore delay approximation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, which are quite encouraging.