Introducing a Full-Adder Structure for Finite Field in QCA

Abstract

While transistor technology still dominates the field of integrated circuits, as circuits grow larger and transistors become smaller down to the nanoscale, this technology is facing increasingly difficult challenges in terms of temperature control, power consumption, and leakage current. It has been suggested that the quantum cellular automata (QCA) technology can be a good alternative to the traditional transistor technology. QCA offers major advantages over transistors including smaller size, lower power consumption, and higher switching speed. A finite field is a finite set on which addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division operations are defined and satisfy arithmetic rules and conditions. This paper first provides a brief introduction to the basic concepts of QCA and the mechanism of logic gates and clocking in this technology. Given the excellent speed of this technology, a QCA full adder is then developed and implemented for the finite field GF(2^4) with the goal of reaching a circuit with higher speeds and a lower number of cells and gates.