R.V.

College of Engineering, Bangalore

(Autonomous Institution Affiliated to VTU)
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering

7th Semester
Synopsis for the Mini Project
Project Title:
DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF
GNRFET BASED 4-BIT CPU

Group Members
1 KARTHIK R K

USN
1RV12EC075

Signature

Phone No.
8050975820

2 MEGARAJ T. MAHADIKAR 1RV12EC088

8792817133

3 MUNIRAJ R.

1RV12EC092

7353481265

4 SURAJ M S

1RV12EC163

9482544822

Accepted/Rejected
Guide Signature:
Guide Name:
Date:
1

INTRODUCTION
The conventional CMOS technology was considered as a replacement to NMOS
technology because of the lower power consumption. The chip density increased because
of shrinking size of the transistors. Even though each CMOS transistor dissipates very
little power, when it switches, the huge number of transistors switching at very high rates
of speed have made Power consumption, a major design constraint.
Apart from this, the use of portable electronic devices and micro scale electronic devices
has increased exponentially during recent years. The main requirement of these handheld
devices is reduced power consumption, compact (small area) and high speed of operation.
High performance CPUs that are compact and consume very less power are to be
designed. The CPU consists of ALU (Arithmetic and Logic Unit) and Control Unit,
which basically consist of registers, shifters, Parallel adder, multiplexers and
demultiplexers. The low power concepts are applied at the architectural level to design a
low power CPU.
The project goes one step further by making low power design at the device level by
using Graphene Nano Ribbon based FET. The GNRFET is an emerging technology that
received much attention in recent years. Recent work on GNRFET has shown that they
consume very low power and prove to be a potential replacement to conventional CMOS
in Low power designs.

AIM
The project aims to build a CPU, essentially individual modules using conventional
CMOS and also GNRFET and compare and analyze the results obtained through
simulation. The objective is to reason out the behavior of GNRFET that is corresponding
to the obtained results.

SCOPE and OBJECTIVE

The primary scope of the project is to implement high performance CPUs in hand-held
devices. As Mobile computing is growing with good interfaces like touch screen and
voice inputs, the need for 32-bit and 64-bit CPUs is ever increasing. At the same time
these interfaces are power hungry. A larger touch-screen will consume higher power. This
is where low power modules of the CPU need to be designed.
The objectives of the project are:

Simulate Parallel adder, multiplexer, demultiplexer, shift register among a few

using conventional CMOS technology
2

 Optimize the logic circuit for Low power and simulate to note the results in
hSPICE
Simulate all the modules using GNRFET and note the results in hSPICE. Compare
the results with conventional CMOS technology
Analyze and find the behaviors of GNRFET responsible for the results obtained.

ADVANTAGES OF PROJECT
The project proposes a 4 bit low power CPU which forms the foundation for larger
computers. For applications where power is the major constraint, these designs serve the
purpose. All the portable devices would become less power without compromising on
speed and area. Also, GNRFETs promote eco-friendliness and spread the GO GREEN
concept. A detailed analysis of the results would lead us to explore the specific
characteristics of graphene, responsible for the results obtained. This would help the use
of graphene in different fields, walking along with the emerging technologies.

METHODOLOGY ADOPTED AND SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION

The CPU consists of ALU and CU. The sub modules and design methodologies are
discussed below:
ALU Design: ALU is the digital function that implements the micro-operations on the
information stored in processor registers. The methodology includes the design of
arithmetic section independently and then modifies the so designed circuit to obtain the
required logic operations. The design of ALU depends on the types of logic operations
chosen to be implemented. We consider a parallel adder as the basic component and bring
out various operations out of it. We then integrate ALU with the processor registers and
shifter through multiplexers, to form the whole processor unit.

Fig1. 4-bit parallel adder with subtractor functionality forms the ALU
3

CU design: The control unit is a component of the CPU which translates the instructions
to op-codes and operates on the ALU. The control circuitry consists of Register file,
Multiplexer and shifter. The register file consists of set of registers which store the
operands for arithmetic or logic operation input as well as the output is stored in the
registers. Multiplexers are used to select the respective registers for input and also to
store the output in the destined register. The shifter is used to shift the bits of the output to
achieve multiplication functionality. These modules are created using conventional
CMOS as well as GNRFET and simulated to compare the results.
MUX design results: Multiplexer (Data selector) is a combinational logic circuit that
selects one of the 2n inputs and route it to a single output line. MUX designing is an
important aspect of our projects since these are the building block of almost all sub
modules. So, multiplexers with low power consumption along with minimum delay and
area requirements needs to be designed [2].
We have modeled 32:1 mux using basic gates, 2:1 mux, 4:1 mux, 8:1 mux and simulated
all the circuits and analyzed the IC parameters using HSPICE at 10nm MOS and
GNRFET technologies. We have found that the MUX designed using GNRFET
consumes less power compared to conventional MOS technology.

Fig2.Power Dissipation in 32:1 MUX using GNRFET, CNFET and MOS technologies

Graphene
Graphene is a promising material in the field of VLSI. It was discovered in the year
2004[3]as a two-dimensional (2D) material. Graphene is pure carbon in the form of a very
thin, nearly transparent sheet, one atom thick. Single-layer Graphene is a purely twodimensional material with a lattice consisting of regular hexagons with one carbon atom
at each corner.It can be produced in large quantities using CVD process with electronic
mobility as high as 15000 cm2/Vs. Concomitant to the large mobility, Graphene
conductivity is also high and is observed to be better than that of Copper. With a most
4

conservative estimate, the conductivity of Graphene, at a carrier density of 10 12 m-2

arrived at 9.6 x 105 -1cm-1 as against a value of 6 x 105 -1cm-1 for Copper [4].

fig 3.

is

Electron mobility
vs. band gap for different materials.

Intrinsic 2-D Graphene sheets have zero band gap making them good conductors. But
since we require semiconducting characteristics, Graphene is patterned into 1-D narrow
strips known as Graphene Nano Ribbon (GNR) which opens up band gaps. The band gap
of GNR is inversely proportional to its width. With width < 2nm, GNRs exhibit good
semiconducting properties.[5]

DETAILS OF HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE USED

HSCPICE is the primary tool used to simulate the circuits and for transient, dc and
frequency domain analysis of the circuits. The tool provides GNRFET model files, which
is used to simulate the modules based on GNRFET. The model file consists of the design
parameters of the GNRFET and plays a crucial role in the behavior of the FET.

Fig4. HSPICE reference manual by SYNOPSIS

FUTURE WORK AND CONCLUSION

The project is a proof of concept that GNRFET based designs provides low power
capability to ICs. The project also reasons out the characteristics responsible for the
simulated behavior of the modules and the CPU as a whole.
The work can be extended into building other modules like timers, memory and I/O
subsystems along with the CPU to build a low power microcontroller.

REFERENCES
[1]E. V. Castro et al., Biased bilayer Graphene: Semiconductor with a gap tuneable by
the electric field effect, Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 99, p. 216802, 2007.
[2]B. Dillikumar, K. Charankumar, M. Bharathi Low power multiplexer based full adder
using pass transistor logic, International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer
Engineering & Technology, Vol.1, ISSN: 2278 1323
[3]K. S. Novoselov, A. K. Geim, S. V. Morozov, D. Jiang, Y. Zhang, S.V. Dubonos, I. V.
Grigorieva, and A. A. Firsov, Electric field effect in atomically thin carbon films,
Science, vol. 306, pp. 666669, 2004.
[4] M. Han et al., Energy band-gap engineering of Graphene nanoribbons, Phys. Rev.
Lett., vol. 98, p.206805, 2007.
[5] Ying-Yu Chen, Amit Sangai, Morteza Gholipour, and Deming Chen, Graphene
Nano-Ribbon Field effect transistors as future low power devices, Symposium on Low
power electronics and designs, IEEE, 2013
[6]Na Gong ,Jinhui Wang, Sridhar R Application-driven power efficient ALU design
methodology for modern microprocessors, Santa Clara, CA, March 2013,ISSN :19483287
[7] Zhijin Guan ,Wenjuan Li, Weiping Ding, Yueqin Hang, An Arithmetic Logic Unit design
based on reversible logic gates , Victoria, BC, 26 Aug. 2011, ISSN :1555-579
[8] Raut, V.,Dakhole, P.K, Design and implementation of four bit arithmetic and logic unit using
hybrid single electron transistor and MOSFET at 120nm technology , Pune, Jan. 2015, INSPEC
Accession Number: 15058390
[9]Dubey, V.; Sairam, R., An Arithmetic and Logic Unit Optimized for Area and Power ,
Advanced Computing & Communication Technologies (ACCT), 2014 Fourth International
Conference on Year: 2014
6