Hexagons are the Bestagons: Design Automation for Silicon Dangling Bond Logic

This repository provides supplementary data for the paper Hexagons are the Bestagons: Design Automation for Silicon Dangling Bond Logic by M. Walter, S. S. H. Ng, K. Walus, and R. Wille published in DAC 2022.

You can find a video recording of the DAC 2022 presentation on YouTube and an overview poster in this repository.

     

SiDB Bestagon Gates

All of the gates proposed as part of the Bestagon gate library are included in the bestagon-gates directory. Sub-directories follow a naming convention of NiMo_G[_O] where N denotes the count of inputs, M the count of outputs, G the logic type implemented, and _O an optional suffix denoting the orientation of the gate. For example, 2i1o_nand refers to a 2-input 1-output NAND logic gate.

Inside each subdirectory, the following files are included:

• One or more *.sqjx.zip files containing the simulation results of all logic input permutations which you can visualize in SiQAD by navigating to File, Import Past Results
• One or more *.svg files containing a vector graphics screenshot of all logic input permutations which you can open in Inkscape or other vector graphics editors/viewers
• One *.sqd design file which you can open in SiQAD

The following gates are designed by a reinforcement learning agent (arXiv reference):

• 1i2o_fo2 (fanout)
• 2i1o_and
• 2i1o_nand
• 2i1o_nor
• 2i1o_or
• 2i1o_xnor
• 2i2o_cx
• 2i2o_ha

The following gates are manually designed:

• 1i1o_inv_diag
• 1i1o_inv_straight
• 1i1o_wire_diag
• 1i1o_wire_straight
• 2i2o_hourglass (two wires running top to down in parallel)

Experimental Evaluation: Physical Design of SiDB Layouts

The experiments folder contains all layout files obtained by the physical design process laid out in the paper as well as a C++ code file that implements the algorithm to reproduce said data via the FCN framework fiction.

Source code: bestagon.cpp

The C++ code that implements the physical design algorithm presented in the paper. It utilizes the FCN framework fiction. To compile it, place the file in fiction's experiments folder and call CMake with the -DFICTION_EXPERIMENTS=ON flag.

To learn more, see fiction's documentation on how to build experiments.

Raw data: bestagon.json

When running the binary that results from compiling bestagon.cpp, a bestagon.json file is created (as well as a directory with layout files, see below). This file contains extensive experimental data in JSON format together with a Git commit tag that points towards the version it was compiled with. The file existing in this repo points towards a tag in fiction's repo.

Formatted data: bestagon.csv

An excerpt from bestagon.json that was presented in Table I of the paper.

Circuit layouts: layouts/

A directory that contains dot-accurate SiDB layouts generated by the compiled bestagon.cpp. The layouts are present in SQD format that is used by the SiDB CAD tool SiQAD. Utilizing this tool, the circuit layouts' behavior can be validated by physical simulations.

The respective logic networks that were used as specification for the physical design process were taken from

A Placement and Routing Algorithm for Quantum-dot Cellular Automata by A. Trindade et al. in SBCCI 2016 (IEEE Xplore)

and

Placement and Routing by Overlapping and Merging QCA Gates by G. Fontes et al. in ISCAS 2018 (IEEE Xplore).

These networks are established benchmarks in the domain of FCN technologies and are available as Verilog files in fiction's experiment sandbox.

Reference

Please find the paper in the ACM Digital Library.

In case you are using the Bestagon gate library in your work, we would be thankful if you referred to it by citing the following publication:

@inproceedings{walter2022hexagons,
  title={{Hexagons are the Bestagons: Design Automation for Silicon Dangling Bond Logic}},
  author={Walter, Marcel and Ng, Samuel Sze Hang and Walus, Konrad and Wille, Robert},
  booktitle={Design Automation Conference (DAC)},
  pages = {739--744},
  year={2022}
}