More Than Moore's Law: Nanofabrics and Architectures

In the nanoelectronics era with ever smaller devices and higher densities, power dissipation and fault tolerance are the two most critical issues to be resolved. The fabrication of reliable and less power dissipating nanosystems requires new approaches to nanodevice integration, which makes Nano Architectonics one of the emerging research directions. This paper presents an example of recent progress of using carbon nanotubes as a nanofabric in working towards this objective. As an alternative route to the traditional electron-based circuitry, we also discuss the feasibility of spin-based nanofabrics consisting of spin-based memory elements united via spin wave buses. These approaches are most notably developed by the Focus Center Research Program (FCRP) -Center on Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics (FENA) and the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI) -Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN).