127 research outputs found
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
Implementation of multi-CLB designs using quantum-dot cellular automata
CMOS scaling is currently facing a technological barrier. Novel technologies are being proposed to keep up with the need for computation power and speed. One of the proposed ideas is the quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) technology. QCA uses quantum mechanical effects in the device at the molecular scale. QCA systems have the potential for low power, high density, and regularity. This thesis studies QCA devices and uses those devices to build a simple field programmable gate array (FPGA). The FPGA is a combination of multiple configure logical blocks (CLBs) tiled together. Most previous work on this area has focused on fixed logic and programmable interconnect. In contrast, the work at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has designed and simulated a configurable logic block (CLB) based on look-up tables (LUTs). This thesis presents a simple FPGA that consists of multiple copies of the CLB created by the RIT group. The FPGA is configured to emulate a ripple-carry adder and a bit-serial multiplier. The latency and throughput of both functions are analyzed. We employ a multilevel approach to design specification and simulation. QCADesigner software is used for layout and simulation of an individual CLB. For the FPGA, the high-level HDLQ Verilog library is used. This hybrid approach provides a high degree of confidence in reasonable simulation time
Information-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis of Stochastic Behaviors in Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata
Novel ultra-energy-efficient reversible designs of sequential logic quantum-dot cellular automata flip-flop circuits
The version of record of this article, first published in [The Journal of Supercomputing], is available online at Publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11227-023-05134-1Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is a technological approach to implement digital circuits with exceptionally high integration density, high switching frequency, and low energy dissipation. QCA circuits are a potential solution to the energy dissipation issues created by shrinking microprocessors with ultra-high integration densities. Current QCA circuit designs are irreversible, yet reversible circuits are known to increase energy efficiency. Thus, the development of reversible QCA circuits will further reduce energy dissipation. This paper presents novel reversible and irreversible sequential QCA set/reset (SR), data (D), Jack Kilby (JK), and toggle (T) flip-flop designs based on the majority gate that utilizes the universal, standard, and efficient (USE) clocking scheme, which allows the implementation of feedback paths and easy routing for sequential QCA-based circuits. The simulation results confirm that the proposed reversible QCA USE sequential flip-flop circuits exhibit energy dissipation less than the Landauer energy limit. Irreversible QCA USE flip-flop designs, although having higher energy dissipation, sometimes have floorplan areas and delay times less than those of reversible designs; therefore, they are also explored. The trade-offs between the energy dissipation versus the area cost and delay time for the reversible and irreversible QCA circuits are examined comprehensively
Ripple clock schemes for quantum-dot cellular automata circuits
Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is an emerging technology for building digital circuits at nano-scale. It is considered as an alternative to widely used complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology because of its key features, which include low power operation, high density and high operating frequency. Unlike conventional logic circuits in which information is transferred by electrical current, QCA operates with the help of coulomb interaction between two adjacent QCA cells. A QCA cell is a set of four quantum-dots that are placed near the corners of a square. Due to the fact that clocking provides power and control of data flow in QCA, it is considered to be the backbone of QCA operation. This thesis presents the design and simulation of a ripple clock scheme and an enhanced ripple clock scheme for QCA circuits. In the past, different clock schemes were proposed and studied which were focused on data flow in particular direction or reducing delay. This proposed thesis will study the design and simulation of new clock schemes which are more realistic for implementation, give a freedom to propagate logic in all directions, suitable for both combinational and sequential circuits and has potential to support testing and reconfiguration up to some extent. A variety of digital circuits including a 2–to–1 multiplexer, a 1–bit memory, an RS latch, a full adder, a 4–bit adder and a 2–to–4 decoder are implemented and simulated using these clock schemes. A 2–to–4 decoder is used to demonstrate the testing capabilities of these clock schemes. All QCA layouts are drawn and simulated in QCADesigner
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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
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
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