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

Design of Efficient Full Adder in Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata

Further downscaling of CMOS technology becomes challenging as it faces limitation of feature size reduction. Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA), a potential alternative to CMOS, promises efficient digital design at nanoscale. Investigations on the reduction of QCA primitives (majority gates and inverters) for various adders are limited, and very few designs exist for reference. As a result, design of adders under QCA framework is gaining its importance in recent research. This work targets developing multi-layered full adder architecture in QCA framework based on five-input majority gate proposed here. A minimum clock zone (2 clock) with high compaction (0.01 μm2) for a full adder around QCA is achieved. Further, the usefulness of such design is established with the synthesis of high-level logic. Experimental results illustrate the significant improvements in design level in terms of circuit area, cell count, and clock compared to that of conventional design approaches

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

Reversible Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata-Based Arithmetic Logic Unit

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) are a promising nanoscale computing technology that exploits the quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons between quantum dots in a cell andelectrostatic interaction between dots in neighboring cells. QCA can achieve higher speed, lowerpower, and smaller areas than conventional, complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Developing QCA circuits in a logically and physically reversible manner can provide exceptional reductions in energy dissipation. The main challenge is to maintain reversibility down to the physical level. A crucial component of a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) is the arithmetic logic unit (ALU), which executes multiple logical and arithmetic functions on the data processed by the CPU. Current QCA ALU designs are either irreversible or logically reversible; however, they lack physical reversibility, a crucial requirement to increase energy efficiency. This paper shows a new multilayer design for a QCA ALU that can carry out 16 different operations and is both logically and physically reversible. The design is based on reversible majority gates, which are the key building blocks. We use QCA Designer-E software to simulate and evaluate energy dissipation. The proposed logically and physically reversible QCA ALU offers an improvement of 88.8% in energy efficiency. Compared to the next most efficient 16-operation QCA ALU, this ALU uses 51% fewer QCA cells and 47% less area

Design and Simulation of Reversible Time Synchronized Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata Combinational Logic Circuits with Ultralow Energy

The quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) represent emerging nanotechnology that is poised to supersede the current complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor digital integrated circuit technology. QCA constitutes an extremely promising transistor-less paradigm that can be downscaled to the molecular level, thereby facilitating tera-scale device integration and extremely low energy dissipation. Reversible QCA circuits, which have reversibility sustained down from the logical level to the physical level, can execute computing operations dissipating less energy than the Landauer energy limit (kBTln2). Time synchronization of logic gates is an essential additional requirement, especially in cases involving complex circuits, for ensuring accurate computational results. This paper reports the design and simulation of eight new both logically and physically reversible time-synchronized QCA combinational logic circuits. The new circuit design presented here mitigates the clock delay problems, which are caused by the non-synchronization of logic gate information, via the use of an inherently more symmetric circuit configuration. The simulation results confirm the behavior of the proposed reversible time-synchronized QCA combinational logic circuits which exhibit ultralow energy dissipation and simultaneously provide accurate computational results

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

Simulation of Random Cell Displacements in QCA

In this work, we analyze the behaviour of quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) building blocks in the presence of random cell displacements. The QCA cells are modeled using the coherence vector description and simulations are performed using the QCADesigner tool. We evaluate various fundamental circuit elements, including the wire, the inverter, the majority gate, and the two approaches to wire crossing: the coplanar crossover and the multi-layer crossover. We show that the different building blocks have different tolerances to such displacements. The coplanar crossover and inverter show the weakest tolerance, while the wire is the most robust. Our results also show that the tolerance to random displacements is not a function of cell size, they depend instead on but rather of the circuit layout