Design of Novel Coplanar Counter Circuit in Quantum Dot Cellular Automata Technology

Abstract

One of the emerging technology that can be used for replacing CMOS technology is Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) technology. Counter circuits are widely used circuits in the design of digital circuits. This paper presents and evaluates circuits for 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-bit coplanar counter in the QCA technology. The designed QCA coplanar counter circuits are based on the modified D-Flip-Flop (D-FF) circuit that is designed in this paper. The designed QCA circuits are implemented and verified by using QCADesigner tool version 2.0.3. The results show that the designed circuits for 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-bit coplanar counter contain 44 (0.03 μm2), 93 (0.07 μm2), 160 (0.13 μm2), and 245 (0.2 μm2) quantum cells (area). The comparison results indicate that the designed circuits have advantages compared to other QCA circuits in terms of cost, area, and cell count.