Robustness Analysis of Atomic Silicon Quantum Dot Logic Gates

Among the technologies of Field Coupled Nanocomputing (FCN), the newly proposed Atomic Silicon Quantum Dot (SiQD) has attracted considerable attention from the community. It works at room temperature, presents high speed, ultra-low energy consumption, and has high integration potential, being a promising alternative for the Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) paradigm. Nevertheless, the technology is still in its early stages. Although there are already some design rules proposals, no study investigates the effects of dangling bond placement defects on logic gates. This paper proposes a novel methodology for this purpose, the Systematic Analysis Model, and presents the results considering 2-input OR, XOR, AND, XNOR, and NAND gates. Moreover, we show two new alternative designs for the 2-input Y-shaped OR and T-shaped NAND gates, up to 12.5% more reliable than the state-of-the-art. We also propose a metric for the design’s reliability based on simulations using the SiQAD simulator.