3-D nFPGA: A Reconfigurable Architecture for 3-D CMOS/Nanomaterial Hybrid Digital Circuits

In this paper, the authors introduce a novel reconfigurable architecture, named 3-D Field-Programmable Gate Array (3-D nFPGA), which utilizes 3-D integration techniques and new nanoscale materials synergistically. The proposed architecture is based on CMOS nanohybrid techniques that incorporate nanomaterials such as carbon nanotube bundles and nanowire crossbars into CMOS fabrication process. This architecture also has built-in features for fault tolerance and heat alleviation. Using unique features of FPGAs and a novel 3-D stacking method enabled by the application of nanomaterials, 3-D nFPGA obtains a 4x footprint reduction comparing to the traditional CMOS-based 2-D FPGAs.