Efficient co-planar adder designs in quantum dot cellular automata: Energy and cost optimization with crossover elimination

Abstract

Quantum dot cellular automata (QCA) stands as a highly promising nanotechnology, capable of outperforming conventional CMOS technology. Leveraging its advantages, this paper addresses the challenges in adder circuits related to size, delay, and cost by integrating QCA technology. A novel layout for a co-planar full adder in QCA is introduced, featuring a half-adder design with 23 cells in a single layer without any crossover, achieving a delay of 0.25 clock cycles. By utilizing inter-cellular effects inherent in QCA technology, the presented designs offer significant improvements in a variety of design metrics, and a cost efficiency of 64.3%, distinguishing them from traditional logic design approaches. Additionally, in order to ensure an efficient routing channel and a consistent structure of the adder design, a Universal, Scalable, and Efficient (USE) clocking scheme has also been employed. The adder design is further used to build 4-bit and 8-bit Ripple Carry Adders. An extensive study on energy dissipation using QCADesigner-E and QCAPro tools is conducted for three tunneling energies (0.5 Ek, 1 Ek, and 1.5 Ek). The full adder design showcases substantial improvement in energy to delay cost when compared to the closest reported design, achieving improvements of 91.66%, 89.03%, and 88% at 0.5 Ek, 1 Ek, and 1.5 Ek, respectively. The results highlight enhanced circuit efficiency and streamlined layouts, outperforming existing models and offering substantial benefits to high-performance and energy-efficient computing systems.