CMOL: Second Life for Silicon?

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development of CMOL circuits, which integrate CMOS technology with nanodevices to achieve extremely high density and performance in digital and neuromorphic applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of CMOL architectures, highlighting their potential for combining CMOS flexibility with nanodevice density for advanced computing.

Findings

CMOL circuits can reach device densities of 10^12 per cm^2.

They can perform up to 10^20 operations per cm^2 per second.

CMOL technology offers a promising path for high-performance, low-cost nanodevice integration.

Abstract

This report is a brief review of the recent work on architectures for the prospective hybrid CMOS/nanowire/ nanodevice ("CMOL") circuits including digital memories, reconfigurable Boolean-logic circuits, and mixed-signal neuromorphic networks. The basic idea of CMOL circuits is to combine the advantages of CMOS technology (including its flexibility and high fabrication yield) with the extremely high potential density of molecular-scale two-terminal nanodevices. Relatively large critical dimensions of CMOS components and the "bottom-up" approach to nanodevice fabrication may keep CMOL fabrication costs at affordable level. At the same time, the density of active devices in CMOL circuits may be as high as 1012 cm2 and that they may provide an unparalleled information processing performance, up to 1020 operations per cm2 per second, at manageable power consumption.