Hybrid Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata Nanocomputing Circuits

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is an emerging transistor-less field-coupled nanocomputing (FCN) approach to ultra-scale ‘nanochip’ integration. In QCA, to represent digital circuitry, electrostatic repulsion between electrons and the mechanism of electron tunnelling in quantum dots are used. QCA technology can surpass conventional complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology in terms of clock speed, reduced occupied chip area, and energy efficiency. To develop QCA circuits, irreversible majority gates are typically used as the primary components. Recently, some studies have introduced reversible design techniques, using reversible majority gates as the main building block, to develop ultra-energy-efficient QCA circuits. However, this approach resulted in time delays, an increase in the number of QCA cells used, and an increase in the chip area occupied. This work introduces a novel hybrid design strategy employing irreversible, reversible, and partially reversible QCA gates to establish an optimal balance between power consumption, delay time, and occupied area. This hybrid technique allows the designer to have more control over the circuit characteristics to meet different system needs. A combination of reversible, irreversible, and innovative partially reversible majority gates is used in the proposed hybrid design method. We evaluated the hybrid design method by examining the half-adder circuit as a case study. We developed four hybrid QCA half-adder circuits, each of which simultaneously incorporates various types of majority gates. The QCADesigner-E 2.2 simulation tool was used to simulate the performance and energy efficiency of the half-adders. This tool provides numerical results for the circuit input/output response and heat dissipation at the physical level within a microscopic quantum mechanical model.N/

NOVEL SINGLE LAYER FAULT TOLERANCE RCA CONSTRUCTION FOR QCA TECHNOLOGY

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) technology has become a promising and accessible candidate that can be used for digital circuits implementation at Nanoscale, but the circuit design in the QCA technology has been limited due to fabrication high-defect rate. So, this issue is an interesting research topic in the QCA circuits design. In this study, a novel 3-input Fault Tolerance (FT) Majority Gate (MG) is developed. Accordingly, an efficient 1-bit QCA full adder is developed using the developed 3-input MG. Then, a new 4-bit FT QCA Ripple Carry Adder (RCA) is developed based on the proposed 1-bit FT QCA FA. The developed circuits are implemented in the QCADesigner tool version 2.0.3. The results indicate that the developed QCA circuits provide advantages compared to other QCA circuits in terms of double and single cell missing defect, area and delay time

Design of Adiabatic MTJ-CMOS Hybrid Circuits

Low-power designs are a necessity with the increasing demand of portable devices which are battery operated. In many of such devices the operational speed is not as important as battery life. Logic-in-memory structures using nano-devices and adiabatic designs are two methods to reduce the static and dynamic power consumption respectively. Magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) is an emerging technology which has many advantages when used in logic-in-memory structures in conjunction with CMOS. In this paper, we introduce a novel adiabatic hybrid MTJ/CMOS structure which is used to design AND/NAND, XOR/XNOR and 1-bit full adder circuits. We simulate the designs using HSPICE with 32nm CMOS technology and compared it with a non-adiabatic hybrid MTJ/CMOS circuits. The proposed adiabatic MTJ/CMOS full adder design has more than 7 times lower power consumtion compared to the previous MTJ/CMOS full adder

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata: Review Paper

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is one of the most important discoveries that will be the successful alternative for CMOS technology in the near future. An important feature of this technique, which has attracted the attention of many researchers, is that it is characterized by its low energy consumption, high speed and small size compared with CMOS.  Inverter and majority gate are the basic building blocks for QCA circuits where it can design the most logical circuit using these gates with help of QCA wire. Due to the lack of availability of review papers, this paper will be a destination for many people who are interested in the QCA field and to know how it works and why it had taken lots of attention recentl

A Novel Reconfiguration Scheme in Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata for Energy Efficient Nanocomputing

Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is currently being investigated as an alternative to CMOS technology. There has been extensive study on a wide range of circuits from simple logical circuits such as adders to complex circuits such as 4-bit processors. At the same time, little if any work has been done in considering the possibility of reconfiguration to reduce power in QCA devices. This work presents one of the first such efforts when considering reconfigurable QCA architectures which are expected to be both robust and power efficient. We present a new reconfiguration scheme which is highly robust and is expected to dissipate less power with respect to conventional designs. An adder design based on the reconfiguration scheme will be presented in this thesis, with a detailed power analysis and comparison with existing designs. In order to overcome the problems of routing which comes with reconfigurability, a new wire crossing mechanism is also presented as part of this thesis

Cellular Structures for Computation in the Quantum Regime

We present a new cellular data processing scheme, a hybrid of existing cellular automata (CA) and gate array architectures, which is optimized for realization at the quantum scale. For conventional computing, the CA-like external clocking avoids the time-scale problems associated with ground-state relaxation schemes. For quantum computing, the architecture constitutes a novel paradigm whereby the algorithm is embedded in spatial, as opposed to temporal, structure. The architecture can be exploited to produce highly efficient algorithms: for example, a list of length N can be searched in time of order cube root N.Comment: 11 pages (LaTeX), 3 figure

New efficient designs of reversible logic gates and circuits in the QCA technology

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is a developing nanotechnology, which seems to be a good candidate to replace the conventional complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The QCA has the advantages of very low power dissipation, faster switching speed, and extremely low circuit area, which can be used in designing nanoscale reversible circuits. In this paper, the new efficient QCA implementations of the basic reversible Gates such as: CNOT, Toffoli, Feynman, Double Feynman, Fredkin, Peres, MCL, and R Gates are presented based on the straight interactions between the QCA cells. Also, the designs of 4-Bit reversible parity checker and 3-bit reversible binary to Grey converter are introduced using these optimized reversible Gates. The proposed layouts are designed and simulated using QCADesigner software. In comparison with previous QCA designs, the proposed layouts are implemented with the minimum area, minimum number of cells, and minimum delay without any wire-crossing techniques. Also, in comparison with the CMOS technology, the proposed layouts are more efficient in terms of the area and power. Therefore, our designs can be used to realize quantum computation in ultralow power computer communication