Investigation into MQCA based low power Digital logic Design Methodology

The use of the phenomenon of magnetism for information processing goes back to the end of XIX century. In 1888, Oberlin Smith suggested the use of permanent magnetic impressions for the recording of sound. The recording of the human voice on a steel piano wire was first carried out in 1898 by a Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen, whose invention gave rise some 30 years later to a magnetic tape recording industry

Designing memory cells with a novel approaches based on a new multiplexer in QCA Technology

Transistor-based CMOS technology has many drawbacks such that it cannot continue to follow the scaling of Moore’s law in the near future. These drawbacks lead researchers to think about alternatives. Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a nanotechnology that has unique features in terms of size and power consumption. QCA has the ability to represent binary numbers by electrons configuration. The memory circuit is a very important part of the digital system. In QCA technology, there are many approaches presented to accomplish memory cells in both RAM and CAM types. CAM is a type of memory used in high-speed applications. In this thesis, novel approaches to design memory cells are proposed. The proposed approaches are based on a 2:1 multiplexer. Using the proposed approach of RAM cell, a singular form of RAM cell (SFRAMC) is accomplished. In QCA technology, researchers strive to design electronic circuits with an emphasis on minimizing important metrics such as cell count, area, delay, cost and power consumption. The SFRAMC demonstrated significant improvements, with a reduction cell count, occupied area and power consumption by 25%, 24% and 36%. In terms of implementation cost, the SFRAMC saves 43% of the cost when compared to the previous best design. On the other hand, by using the proposed approach of CAM cell, two different structures of the QCA-CAM cell have been introduced. The first proposed CAM cell (FPCAMC) gives improvements in terms of cell count, and delay by 15% and 17% respectively. The second proposed CAM cell (SPCAMC) gives improvements in terms of cell count, and delay by 6% and 17% respectively. In terms of total power consumption, both FPCAMC and SPCAMC have an improvement of about 53% over the best-reported design. The above features of the proposed memory cells (RAM and CAM) could pave the road for designing energy-efficient and cost-efficient memory circuits in the future

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 Automata

Modelling and simulation are disciplines of major importance for science and engineering. There is no science without models, and simulation has nowadays become a very useful tool, sometimes unavoidable, for development of both science and engineering. The main attractive feature of cellular automata is that, in spite of their conceptual simplicity which allows an easiness of implementation for computer simulation, as a detailed and complete mathematical analysis in principle, they are able to exhibit a wide variety of amazingly complex behaviour. This feature of cellular automata has attracted the researchers' attention from a wide variety of divergent fields of the exact disciplines of science and engineering, but also of the social sciences, and sometimes beyond. The collective complex behaviour of numerous systems, which emerge from the interaction of a multitude of simple individuals, is being conveniently modelled and simulated with cellular automata for very different purposes. In this book, a number of innovative applications of cellular automata models in the fields of Quantum Computing, Materials Science, Cryptography and Coding, and Robotics and Image Processing are presented