Design of CNTFET-based 2-bit ternary ALU for nanoelectronics

This article presents a hardware-efficient design of 2-bit ternary arithmetic logic unit (ALU) using carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNTFETs) for nanoelectronics. The proposed structure introduces a ternary adder-subtractor functional module to optimise ALU architecture. The full adder-subtractor (FAS) cell uses nearly 72% less transistors than conventional architecture, which contains separate ternary cells for addition as well as subtraction. The presented ALU also minimises ternary function expressions with utilisation of binary gates for optimisation at the circuit level, thus attaining a simple design. Hspice simulations results demonstrate that the ALU ternary circuits achieve great improvement in terms of power delay product with respect to their CMOS counterpart at 32 nm.