Leveraging Negative Capacitance CNTFETs for Image Processing: An Ultra-Efficient Ternary Image Edge Detection Hardware

Recently, integrating ferroelectric materials with nanotransistors such as carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNTFETs) has opened new doors for demonstrating a new generation of ultra-miniature circuits and systems. Utilizing the negative differential resistance effect in negative capacitance CNTFETs (NC-CNTFETs) has spurred the efforts for designing ultra-compact ternary circuits and systems similar to their binary structures. This paper presents an ultra-efficient ternary image edge detection hardware using NC-CNTFET technology. The proposed hardware is endowed with a noise reduction circuitry to mitigate the noise effects. Using four 1times 3 kernels and concatenating the image pixels, the proposed ternary hardware has been designed using only 50 transistors. The proposed ternary hardware at the circuit level shows, on average, 74% improvements regarding power delay-product (PDP) compared to the CNTFET-based counterparts. Our comprehensive simulations indicate that the proposed NC-CNTFET-based hardware shows a 40% improvement in data loss, 2.2 times improvement in performance ratio, and 1.14 times improvement in Pratt's figure-of-merit, respectively, compared to the related designs. Our results accentuate that the proposed NC-CNTFET-based ternary hardware is a breakthrough achievement in demonstrating ultra-efficient and noise-immune ternary image processing circuits beyond the conventional binary counterparts.