Recent Advances on Multivalued Logic Gates: A Materials Perspective

The recent advancements in multivalued logic gates represent a rapid paradigm shift in semiconductor technology toward a new era of hyper Moore's law. Particularly, the significant evolution of materials is guiding multivalued logic systems toward a breakthrough gradually, whereby they are transcending the limits of conventional binary logic systems in terms of all the essential figures of merit, i.e., power dissipation, operating speed, circuit complexity, and, of course, the level of the integration. In this review, recent advances in the field of multivalued logic gates based on emerging materials to provide a comprehensive guideline for possible future research directions are reviewed. First, an overview of the design criteria and figures of merit for multivalued logic gates is presented, and then advancements in various emerging nanostructured materials—ranging from 0D quantum dots to multidimensional heterostructures—are summarized and these materials in terms of device design criteria are assessed. The current technological challenges and prospects of multivalued logic devices are also addressed and major research trends are elucidated.