Exploiting unconventional physical properties, several nanodevices showed an alternative to Moore's Law by the increase of their functionality rather than the pure scaling. Innovative device behaviors transduce to new circuit/architecture opportunities. Here, we focus on a novel class of computation devices that exhibit controllable-polarity property. At advanced technology nodes, Schottky contacts at channel interfaces are becoming challenging to avoid. Hence, devices face an ambipolar behavior, i.e., that the device exhibits n- and p-type characteristics simultaneously. Such a property is desirable for logic computation. Indeed, it has been recently demonstrated by EPFL that by constructing independent double-gate structures on Vertically stacked nanowires FETs (NWFETs), the device polarity can be electrostatically forced to be either n- or p-type. Controllable-polarity devices are logical bi-conditional on both gate values and enable a compact realization of XOR-based logic functions, which are not implementable in CMOS in a compact form. Hyper regular architectures and new EDA tools are then needed to leverage the intrinsic properties of controllable-polarity devices from an application perspective.
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