Towards a holistic CAD platform for nanotechnologies

Silicon-based CMOS technologies are predicted to reach their ultimate limits by the middle of the next decade. Research on nanotechnologies is actively conducted in a world-wide effort to develop new technologies able to maintain the Moore's law. They promise revolutionizing the computing systems by integrating tremendous numbers of devices at low cost. These trends will provide new computing opportunities, have a profound impact on the architectures of computing systems, and require a new paradigm of CAD. The paper presents a work in progress on this direction. It is aimed at fitting requirements and constraints of nanotechnologies, in an effort to achieve efficient use of the huge computing power promised by them. To move toward this goal we are developing CAD tools able to exploit efficiently the huge computing capabilities promised by nanotechnologies in the domain of simulation of complex systems composed by huge numbers of relatively simple elements.