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Promising interconnect materials continue to emerge and are considered as potential replacements for Cu interconnects. In this article, an interconnect technology/system codesign methodology is presented to efficiently optimize generic interconnects using ballistic materials. The key requirements of material-level characteristics to replace conventional Cu counterparts are quantified, such as the channel density, mean free path (MFP), and contact resistance. Furthermore, to achieve maximal chip-level throughput, two interconnect design schemes are proposed and optimized under a given number of metal layers, die area, and power density constraints. Results demonstrate that the optimal design scheme strongly depends on the power constraint, driving devices as well as material parameters, including the contact resistance. It is shown that up to 45% of the throughput improvement can be achieved by replacing both local and intermediate Cu interconnects at an ultralow-power budget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the traditional CMOS technology encounters significant scaling challenges, many emerging beyond-CMOS devices have been proposed and developed to augment or even replace CMOS devices. Spintronic devices have received extensive attention due to several unique attributes, including a low operation voltage and nonvolatility. However, spintronic devices are intrinsically slow because of the long switching delay of the magnet. To overcome the drawback, in this article, we propose and develop a deep pipeline method for generic spintronic majority-gate-based circuits. A fast and efficient pipeline buffer insertion methodology is integrated into the industry-standard placement and routing design flow to ensure the correct functionality. The proposed framework can accurately capture 1) the timing of a multiphase clock-gated spintronic circuit and 2) the energy overhead associated with the supply clocking, which is one major overhead of spintronic circuits. Based on the proposed framework, we demonstrate that a spintronic circuit implemented with a deep pipeline can provide over $10\times $ reduction in energy-delay products compared to their traditional CMOS-based counterparts. In the case study, the proposed deep pipeline method is applied to three emerging spintronic devices. Results show that device-level parameters have significant impacts on circuit-level performance and optimal logic depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]