Fabrication and Design of Nanometer Scale Regular Circuits

Speaker: Haykel Ben Jamaa, Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne

Abstract
Moore’s law has proven its universal validity in the last decades. Today, several technical and economic obstacles have motivated the investigation of emerging technologies based on nanowires, carbon nanotubes and molecular switches. Several arising issues (variability, placement, addressing) can be addressed at either the fabrication or the design level.

Regular organizations of devices and circuits promise to ease the fabrication challenges and to improve the fault-tolerance. In this talk, two regular circuits based on different emerging technologies will be addressed. First, a novel CMOS-compatible fabrication technique of polycrystalline silicon nanowires circuits will be presented, and its ability to yield crossbar circuits will be demonstrated. The focus will be the system level aspects of interfacing crossbar circuits to the rest of the CMOS chip and optimising the encoding scheme. Then, a library of ambipolar carbon nanotube transistors will be presented, and its expressive power will be demonstrated. A novel paradigm of regular fabrics with the designed logic gates will be introduced.

Short Biography
Haykel Ben Jamaa received his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne in July 2009. He has been with the Laboratory of Integrated Systems at EPFL since September 2005. He graduated from the "Technishe Universität München" ( Germany ) and from the "Ecole Centrale Paris" ( France ) in the field of Electrical Engineering. During his studies, Haykel Ben Jamaa had several industrial experiences and overseas activities (Design of modules for the DNA chips at Infineon Munich; Development of laser sensitive CNT FETs at Max-Planck-Institut Stuttgart...). He's currently working on the design challenges for nanoelectronics with a focus on hybrid systems. His work covers manufacturing aspects of crossbar memories as well as reliable system design and architecture.