Finalist EPFL doctorate Award 2010 - Ben Jamaa Mohamed Haykel

Fabrication and design of nanoscale regular circuits.

The scaling of electronic devices is facing today several physical and economic obstacles. Several solutions have been proposed at both manufacturing and system levels in order to address this situation. The assessment of their benefits requires an interdisciplinary approach, so that technological challenges and opportunities can be leveraged at the design level. This research work is a new interdisciplinary approach in the field of emerging technologies. At the technology level, a novel cost-efficient and CMOS-compatible fabrication technique for silicon nanowire crossbars is demonstrated. At the system level, the crossbar decoder design and test is optimized by developing new families of robust and compact encoding schemes. At the logic design level, the ambipolarity of carbon nanotube field effect transistors is leveraged by designing a novel library of logic gates with a higher expressive power and compactness with respect to CMOS.