An efficient design of Quantum-dot Cellular Automata based 5-input majority gate with power analysis

Abstract

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) are among the alternative technologies that enable nanoscale circuit design of high performance and low power consumption features. This work showcases an extensive structural and power analysis of previous 5-input majority gates. We found that the existing 5-input majority gates are not power efficient, and the structures are not well optimized. To overcome this, we proposed a new low-complexity coplanar 5-input majority gate, which consumes less power compared to prior designs. A novel 1-bit full adder circuit is presented to evaluate the suitability of the proposed gate. The results demonstrate that the proposed full adder performs equally well compared to existing multilayer designs, and performs better in the case of previous coplanar full adder designs in all aspects. Our design achieves 22% reduction in cell count and takes 18% less area in comparison to the best single layer design. Furthermore, it produces an equal delay, when compared to the best design in this segment. The QCADesigner tool is used to validate the layout of the proposed designs and the QCAPro power estimator tool is used to evaluate the power dissipation of all considered designs. Our results clearly demonstrate that, the hardware requirement for a QCA design is reduced and circuits become simpler in level, gate counts and clock phases by considering proposed gate.