An Efficient Inverter Logic in Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata for Emerging Nanocircuits

Abstract

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) has been advocated as one of the most propitious nanoelectronic technologies. The fault rates in QCA are very high due to its susceptibility to cell deposition defects. Also, the power requirements of QCA are getting more critical to avoid either over-design for power rails or unreliability under high-performance stress. Among the different primitive logic structure of QCA, the inverter is keyed out to enable more reliable as well as low-power design. This work proposes a novel approach to generate stimulus for low-power dissipation in QCA logic primitives (inverter) in order to obtain worst-case power scenarios. Hybridizing rotated and non-rotated QCA cell together with a new low-power inverter tile structure in QCA is proposed. Further, the functional characterization of the proposed inverter tile is investigated. Kink energy estimation, as well as simulation results, is considered for verifying the circuit layout and functionality. Moreover, a composable logic block is synthesized that realizes triple fanout (with two inverted output). The reliability of these logic primitives is also extended by implementing full adder and XOR circuit.