Computational Device and Circuit Concepts Based on Insulator-Metal Transition Phenomena

Our ever-expanding information eco-system demands energy efficient hardware platforms for computing and data storage. While in the past, these demands have been fulfilled through CMOS scaling, this approach alone will not suffice in the future. The goal of this thesis is to explore some of the device and circuit opportunities for computing and data storage hardware that can be enabled by harnessing novel insulator-metal transition (IMT) phenomena. This work will highlight design and engineering strategies using IMT materials that can not only enhance the performance of current devices but also to create new hardware primitives. This work will discuss a hybrid transistor design – Phase-FET where IMT oxides- that exhibit orders of magnitude change in resistivity- are integrated with a conventional transistor to surpass its fundamental performance limits. On the other hand, the same materials and their properties can be leveraged to create new functionalities such as phase transition based synchronized oscillator devices which provide an alternate, and potentially, a more energy-efficient non-Boolean approach to certain problems such higher order distance computation and graph coloring which are difficult to compute in the conventional CMOS based framework. Finally, future directions for this work including the opportunities and challenges will be discussed.