CAD Tools for Emerging Nanotechnologies

With the scaling of CMOS technology slowly coming to a halt due to quantum mechanics effects progressively eroding its performance as transistor dimensions shrink, new and experimental technologies for digital circuits are being explored and prototyped with increased effort. Design tools for such technologies have been created for these purposes and their development and refinement is now more critical than ever. ToPoliNano, developed by the VLSI group of the Polytechnic University of Turin, is one such tool, dedicated to the design and simulation of digital circuits built with nanomagnetic technologies based on Magnetic QCA. A robust EDA tool by itself with an easy-to-use GUI, it only missed, with regards to the more established professional software available to circuit designers that work with CMOS technology, the flexibility of a dual GUI/command-line offering. The aim of this Master’s thesis consisted therefore of expanding the capabilities of ToPoliNano by equipping it with a text-based workflow, allowing users to access the program’s powerful features by means of text commands and automation scripts. In order to bring the aforementioned text-based workflow to life, three software modules have been developed in succession as part of the thesis, each complementing the others: • a command-line interface (CLI) able to tokenize, parse and interpret a variety of text commands mapped to the functionalities of ToPoliNano (for example: layout generation, layout import/export, circuit simulation, etc.); • a new general-purpose preprocessor capable of processing variables, loops and conditional statements, which unlocks the possibility of writing complex scripts that go beyond a simple list of commands; • a console mode (loaded into terminal), referred to as no-GUI mode, which directly interfaces the user with the CLI (and, by extension, to ToPoliNano) without the need to load the GUI (which also allows the user to interact with the CLI but via widgets included in the graphical interface). As the final part of the thesis, a comprehensive user manual was written - illustrating the purpose of each supported text command, the structure of the command-line workflow and the advanced scripting features available to the user, including a collection of example scripts - to help the user gain a complete, in-depth understanding of the new instruments at their disposal for designing digital circuits.