From Biochips to Quantum Circuits: Computer-Aided Design for Emerging Technologies

While previous decades have witnessed impressive accomplishments in the design and realization of conventional computing devices, physical boundaries and cost restrictions led to an increasing interest in alternative technologies (often referred to as Beyond CMOS or More than Moore technologies). In addition, these accomplishments also triggered many "complementary" applications and led to technologies providing an additional value to the conventional logic (often referred to as More than Moore). This led to a variety of emerging technologies such as Quantum Computation, Optical Circuits, or Micro uidic Biochips out of which many are considered very promising and some even entered the market recently. This poses new challenges to researchers and engineers working in computer-aided design. In this tutorial paper, we provide an overview on the main concepts of selected emerging technologies as well as the resulting design methods. To this end, we review the respective technological background and introduce the correspondingly used circuit models. Based on that, we show how computer-aided design has to adapt the common design tasks and review recently proposed solutions.