An Efficient Module for Full Adders in Quantum-dot Cellular Automata

Abstract

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA), a new computing paradigm at nanoscale, may be a prospective alternative to conventional CMOS-based integrated circuits. Modular design methodology in QCA domain has not been widely investigated. In this paper, an efficient module with fault tolerance is proposed, which can be employed to fabricate three-input and five-input majority gates that are the fundamental primitives for designing circuits in QCA. With cells omission in the versatile module, various logic gates will be achieved, such as Nand-Nor-Inverter (NNI) gate and And-Or-Inverter (AOI) gate. Moreover, in order to seek out an efficient full adder, five various QCA full adders are designed and exhaustively compared in terms of area, complexity, latency, reliability and power dissipation and also compared with existing fault-tolerant full adders. Two simulation tools, QCADesigner and QCAPro, are utilized in the waveform simulations for verifying the correctness of proposed circuits and power consumption, respectively. The analysis results reveal that full adder V has significant improvements in contrast to its counterparts with above criteria. To test the practicability of full adder V, multi-bit adders will be designed in single-layer and compared with previous adders in terms of area, complexity and QCA cost, which proves the merits of our work.