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

Magnetic Cellular Nonlinear Network with Spin Wave Bus for Image Processing

We describe and analyze a cellular nonlinear network based on magnetic nanostructures for image processing. The network consists of magneto-electric cells integrated onto a common ferromagnetic film - spin wave bus. The magneto-electric cell is an artificial two-phase multiferroic structure comprising piezoelectric and ferromagnetic materials. A bit of information is assigned to the cell's magnetic polarization, which can be controlled by the applied voltage. The information exchange among the cells is via the spin waves propagating in the spin wave bus. Each cell changes its state as a combined effect of two: the magneto-electric coupling and the interaction with the spin waves. The distinct feature of the network with spin wave bus is the ability to control the inter-cell communication by an external global parameter - magnetic field. The latter makes possible to realize different image processing functions on the same template without rewiring or reconfiguration. We present the results of numerical simulations illustrating image filtering, erosion, dilation, horizontal and vertical line detection, inversion and edge detection accomplished on one template by the proper choice of the strength and direction of the external magnetic field. We also present numerical assets on the major network parameters such as cell density, power dissipation and functional throughput, and compare them with the parameters projected for other nano-architectures such as CMOL-CrossNet, Quantum Dot Cellular Automata, and Quantum Dot Image Processor. Potentially, the utilization of spin waves phenomena at the nanometer scale may provide a route to low-power consuming and functional logic circuits for special task data processing

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

Flip Flops Design in Quantum Dot Cellular Automata Technology: Towards Digitization

Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a transistor-less technology. In QCA, Columbic repulsion between electrons in the quantum dots makes data transfer possible. This paper presents the design of flip flops using a proposed Rotated-Normal Cells with Displacement (RND) inverter and a cell interaction method. The SR latch, SR Flip Flop (FF), D FF, and T FF are developed using QCA. The proposed D FF gives total and average energy dissipation of 1.31e-002eV and 1.19e-003eV respectively. It also gives a delay of 1 clock phase.  The Proposed T FF provides total and average energy dissipation of 2.40e-002eV and 2.18e-003eV respectively, depicting efficient D FF and T FF in energy dissipation. The proposed SR Flip flop design gives an efficient area. The FFs with the proposed RND inverter and cell interaction method can be the best choice for future Nano communication to construct Nano circuits with less energy dissipation and high speed

Fault tolerance issues in nanoelectronics

The astonishing success story of microelectronics cannot go on indefinitely. In fact, once devices reach the few-atom scale (nanoelectronics), transient quantum effects are expected to impair their behaviour. Fault tolerant techniques will then be required. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the problem of transient errors in nanoelectronic devices. Transient error rates for a selection of nanoelectronic gates, based upon quantum cellular automata and single electron devices, in which the electrostatic interaction between electrons is used to create Boolean circuits, are estimated. On the bases of such results, various fault tolerant solutions are proposed, for both logic and memory nanochips. As for logic chips, traditional techniques are found to be unsuitable. A new technique, in which the voting approach of triple modular redundancy (TMR) is extended by cascading TMR units composed of nanogate clusters, is proposed and generalised to other voting approaches. For memory chips, an error correcting code approach is found to be suitable. Various codes are considered and a lookup table approach is proposed for encoding and decoding. We are then able to give estimations for the redundancy level to be provided on nanochips, so as to make their mean time between failures acceptable. It is found that, for logic chips, space redundancies up to a few tens are required, if mean times between failures have to be of the order of a few years. Space redundancy can also be traded for time redundancy. As for memory chips, mean times between failures of the order of a few years are found to imply both space and time redundancies of the order of ten

Design and analysis of efficient QCA reversible adders

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) as an emerging nanotechnology are envisioned to overcome the scaling and the heat dissipation issues of the current CMOS technology. In a QCA structure, information destruction plays an essential role in the overall heat dissipation, and in turn in the power consumption of the system. Therefore, reversible logic, which significantly controls the information flow of the system, is deemed suitable to achieve ultra-low-power structures. In order to benefit from the opportunities QCA and reversible logic provide, in this paper, we first review and implement prior reversible full-adder art in QCA. We then propose a novel reversible design based on three- and five-input majority gates, and a robust one-layer crossover scheme. The new full-adder significantly advances previous designs in terms of the optimization metrics, namely cell count, area, and delay. The proposed efficient full-adder is then used to design reversible ripple-carry adders (RCAs) with different sizes (i.e., 4, 8, and 16 bits). It is demonstrated that the new RCAs lead to 33% less garbage outputs, which can be essential in terms of lowering power consumption. This along with the achieved improvements in area, complexity, and delay introduces an ultra-efficient reversible QCA adder that can be beneficial in developing future computer arithmetic circuits and architecture