Memristor-based Pass Gate for FPGA Programmable Routing Switch

The advancement of memristor technologies has recently attracted huge interest in exploiting their superior potential properties for enabling hybrid memristor-CMOS systems. This work presents a memristor-based Pass Gate - mPG, as a primitive cell as well as its deployment for implementing programmable routing switches targeting FPGAs. The mPG, consists of a transistor and output buffer(s) and can be used to discriminate resistance states for both binary and multistate memristor technologies without additional circuitry. The proposed routing structure eliminates leakage current and avoids degrading memristor's characteristics due to voltage drops, which are essential factors for building reliable large-scale digital systems like FPGAs. Simulation results of mPG-based switches show that the gate can be deployed for a wide range of memristor resistance with a switching delay in the subnanosecond range. Physical implementations of the proposed primitive demonstrate savings of about 50% of the design in comparison to standard CMOS designs.