Will thermal noise affect nano-communications?

The aim of this paper is to investigate how wire lengths would affect the reliability of scaled CMOS circuits during operations, by analyzing how the Johnson-Nyquist (thermal) noise on the wires affects the probability of failure (defined as the probability of switching) of scaled CMOS transistors. To this end, we consider classical CMOS circuits, and base our analysis on statistical considerations. In particular, we propose a model (that can be extended to more complex devices) for an elementary system which consists of a wire and a 16nm CMOS transistor. The distribution of the energy stored in the wire is also studied analytically, and numerical results are given.