A novel FPGA-programmable switch matrix interconnection element in quantum-dot cellular automata

The Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is a novel nanotechnology, promising extra low-power, extremely dense and very high-speed structure for the construction of logical circuits at a nanoscale. In this paper, initially previous works on QCA-based FPGA’s routing elements are investigated, and then an efficient, symmetric and reliable QCA programmable switch matrix (PSM) interconnection element is introduced. This element has a simple structure and offers a complete routing capability. It is implemented using a bottom-up design approach that starts from a dense and high-speed 2:1 multiplexer and utilise it to build the target PSM interconnection element. In this study, simulations of the proposed circuits are carried out using QCAdesigner, a layout and simulation tool for QCA circuits. The results demonstrate high efficiency of the proposed designs in QCA-based FPGA routing.     

量子元胞自动机共面五输入择多门结构的分析与设计

量子元胞自动机（Quantum-dot Cellular Automata,QCA）是一种具有新型计算范式的纳米器件,它是未来有望替代传统CMOS器件的有力竞争者之一.本文首先从QCA器件的功耗角度出发,对影响半径为41nm的QCA共面系统中元胞的耦合度进行建模,根据元胞之间的位置关系构造QCA门结构模型,据此对现有的共面五输入择多门进行分类,通过性能分析总结其结构特点,以此设计出一个新的低功耗五输入择多门,测试结果表明该结构功耗最低且其他性能也相对较优.另外,为验证所提出五输入择多门在电路中的性能,本文选择MR Azghadi全加器设计了一款共面QCA全加器,与同类加法器相比性能也最优.     

Single-bit digital comparator circuit design using quantum-dot cellular automata nanotechnology

The large amount of secondary effects in complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor technology limits its application in the ultra-nanoscale region. Circuit designers explore a new technology for the ultra-nanoscale region, which is the quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA). Low-energy dissipation, high speed, and area efficiency are the key features of the QCA technology. This research proposes a novel, low-complexity, QCA-based one-bit digital comparator circuit for the ultra-nanoscale region. The performance of the proposed comparator circuit is presented in detail in this paper and compared with that of existing designs. The proposed QCA structure for the comparator circuit only consists of 19 QCA cells with two clock phases. QCA Designer-E and QCA Pro tools are applied to estimate the total energy dissipation. The proposed comparator saves 24.00% QCA cells, 25.00% cell area, 37.50% layout cost, and 78.11% energy dissipation compared with the best reported similar design.     

An efficient design of CORDIC in Quantum-dot cellular automata technology

Power dissipation of future-integrated systems, consisting of a numberless of devices, is a challenge that cannot be easily solved by classical technologies. Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a Field-Coupled Nanotechnology (FCN) and a potential alternative to traditional CMOS technologies. It offers various features like extremely low-power dissipation, very high operating frequency and nanoscale feature size. This study presents a novel design of CORDIC circuit based on QCA technology. The proposed circuit is based on several proposed QCA sub-modules as adder and Flip-Flop. To design and verify the proposed architecture, QCADesigner tool is employed and power consumption is estimated using QCAPro software. The proposed QCA CORDIC achieves about 69% reduction in power and area compared to previous existing designs. The outcome of this work can open up a new window of opportunity for the design of the CORDIC module and can be used in low-power signal and image processing systems.     

Novel RAM cell designs based on inherent capabilities of quantum-dot cellular automata

Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA) is a novel and attractive method which enables designing and implementing high-performance and low-power consumption digital circuits at nano-scale. Since memory is one of the most applicable basic units in digital circuits, having a fast and optimized QCA-based memory cell is remarkable. Although there are some QCA structures for a memory cell in the literature, however, QCA characteristics may be used in designing a more optimized memory cell than blindly modeling CMOS logics in QCA. In this paper, two improved structures have been proposed for a loop-based Random Access Memory (RAM) cell. In the proposed methods, the inherent capabilities of QCA, such as the programmability of majority gate and the clocking mechanism have been considered. The first proposed method enjoys smaller number of cells and the wasted area has been reduced compared to traditional loop-based RAM cell. For the second proposed method, the memory access time has been duplicated in presence of smaller number of cells. Irregular placement of QCA cells in a QCA layout makes its realization troublesome. So, we have proposed alternative versions of the proposed methods that exploit regularity of clock zones in design and have compared them to each other. QCA designer has been employed for simulation of the proposed designs and proving their validity.     

基于QCA的五输入Majority门设计及应用

Majority门作为多数逻辑电路的基本逻辑单元,其性能直接影响整体电路的质量.使用量子元胞自动机（QCA）设计Majority门具有结构简单的优点.本文提出了一种三层电路实现五输入Majority门的设计,并以此设计了全加器,进一步应用于多位加法器和乘法器中,与已发表的电路设计比较表明,其版图使用面积和元胞数有明显的减少,加法器元胞数和面积改进最高可达43%和87.2%,乘法器元胞数和面积改进最高可达48.2%和100%.     

An enhanced high-speed multi-digit BCD adder using quantum-dot cellular automata

The advent of development of high-performance, low-power digital circuits is achieved by a suitable emerging nanodevice called quantum-dot cellular automata(QCA). Even though many efficient arithmetic circuits were designed using QCA, there is still a challenge to implement high-speed circuits in an optimized manner. Among these circuits, one of the essential structures is a parallel multi-digit decimal adder unit with significant speed which is very attractive for future environments. To achieve high speed, a new correction logic formulation method is proposed for single and multi-digit BCD adder. The proposed enhanced single-digit BCD adder(ESDBA) is 26% faster than the carry flow adder(CFA)-based BCD adder. The multi-digit operations are also performed using the proposed ESDBA, which is cascaded innovatively. The enhanced multi-digit BCD adder(EMDBA) performs two 4-digit and two 8-digit BCD addition 50% faster than the CFA-based BCD adder with the nominal overhead of the area. The EMDBA performs two 4-digit BCD addition 24% faster with 23% decrease in the area, similarly for 8-digit operation the EMDBA achieves 36% increase in speed with 21% less area compared to the existing carry look ahead(CLA)-based BCD adder design. The proposed multi-digit adder produces significantly less delay of(N-1)+3.5 clock cycles compared to the N*One digit BCD adder delay required by the conventional BCD adder method. It is observed that as per our knowledge this is the first innovative proposal for multi-digit BCD addition using QCA.     

基于改进五输入择多门的QCA全加器设计及应用

量子元胞自动机(Quantum-dot cellular automata,QCA)是一种新兴的纳米技术.本文基于改进的五输入择多门,设计出一个全加器,在保持正确逻辑功能的基础上较以往的全加器有一定优势.应用该全加器设计加法器和乘法器,结果表明在某些性能上有显著提高.     

Threshold logic circuit design of parallel adders using resonanttunneling devices

Resonant tunneling devices and circuit architectures based on monostable-bistable transition logic elements (MOBILEs) are promising candidates for future nanoscale integration. In this paper, the design of clocked MOBILE-type threshold logic gates and their application to arithmetic circuit components is investigated. The gates are composed of monolithically integrated resonant tunneling diodes and heterostructure field-effect transistors. Experimental results are presented for a programmable NAND/NOR gate. Design related aspects such as the impact of lateral device scaling on the circuit performance and a bit-level pipelined operation using a four phase clocking scheme are discussed. The increased computational functionality of threshold logic gates is exploited in two full adder designs having a minimal logic depth of two circuit stages. Due to the self-latching behavior the adder designs are ideally suited for an application in a bit-level pipelined ripple carry adder. To improve the speed a novel pipelined carry lookahead addition scheme for this logic family is proposed     

量子元胞自动机全加器的布尔差分测试法

根据布尔差分测试法的基本原理以及量子元胞自动机(QCA)的缺陷特性,提出一种适用于QCA的测试方法。以QCA 1位全加器为例,采用QCA Designer软件,验证该方法的有效性与可行性,并与Tahoori等人提出的QCA电路测试法进行比较。结果表明,新设计的布尔差分测试法具有高故障覆盖率和易测性等优点,对未来复杂QCA电路的测试有一定的借鉴作用。     

A Novel High-Speed and Energy Efficient 10-Transistor Full Adder Design

In this paper, we propose a novel full adder design using as few as ten transistors per bit. Compared with other low-gate-count full adder designs using pass transistor logic, the proposed design features lower operating voltage, higher computing speed and lower energy (power delay product) operation. The design adopts inverter buffered xor/xnor designs to alleviate the threshold voltage loss problem commonly encountered in pass transistor logic design. This problem usually prevents the full adder design from operating in low supply voltage or cascading directly without extra buffering. The proposed design successfully embeds the buffering circuit in the full adder design and the transistor count is minimized. The improved buffering helps the design operate under lower supply voltage compared with existing works. It also enhances the speed performance of the cascaded operation significantly while maintaining the performance edge in energy consumption. For performance comparison, both dc andperformances of the proposed design against various full adder designs are evaluated via extensive HSPICE simulations. The simulation results, based on TSMC 2P4M 0.35-mum process models, indicate that the proposed design has the lowest working V_dd and highest working frequency among all designs using ten transistors. It also features the lowest energy consumption per addition among these designs. In addition, the performance edge of the proposed design in both speed and energy consumption becomes even more significant as the word length of the adder increases     

Scalability of Globally Asynchronous QCA (Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata) Adder Design

The concept of clocking for QCA, referred to as the four-phase clocking, is widely used. However, inherited characteristics of QCA, such as the way to hold state, the way to synchronize data flows, and the way to power QCA cells, make the design of QCA circuits quite different from VLSI and introduce a variety of new design challenges. The most severe challenges are due to the fact that the overall timing of a QCA circuit is mainly dependent upon its layout. This issue is commonly referred to as the “layout = timing” problem. To circumvent the problem, a novel self-timed circuit design technique referred to as the Locally Synchronous, globally asynchronous design for QCA has been recently proposed. The proposed technique can significantly reduce the layout–timing dependency from the global network of QCA devices in a circuit; therefore, considerably flexible QCA circuit design is be possible. Also, the proposed technique is more scalable in designing large-scale systems. Since a less number of cells is used, the overall area is smaller and the manufacturability is better. In this paper, numerous multi-bit adder designs are considered to demonstrate the layout efficiency and robustness of the proposed globally asynchronous QCA design technique.     

Binary Adders on Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata

This article describes the design of adder units on quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) nanotechnology, which promises very dense circuits and high operating frequencies, using a single homogeneous layer of the basic cells. We construct pipelined structures without the earlier noise problems, avoided by careful clocking organization, and the modular layouts are verified with the QCADesigner coherence vector simulation. Our designs occupy only a fraction of area compared to the previous noise rejecting design, while having also superior performance, and it is shown that the wiring overhead of the arithmetic circuits on QCA grows with square-law dependence on the operand word length. Power analysis at the fundamental Landauer’s limit shows, that the operating frequencies will indeed be bound by the energy dissipated in information erasure: under irreversible operation, the clock rates of the adder units on molecular QCA are only tens of gigahertz, while the switching speed of the technology is in the terahertz regime.     

Adder design using 5-input majority gate in a novel “Multilayer Gate Design Paradigm” for Quantum Dot Cellular Automata Circuits

This paper proposes a novel design paradigm for circuits designed in quantum dot cellular automata (QCA) technology. Previously reported QCA circuits in the literature have generally been designed in a single layer which is the main logical block in which the inverter and majority gate are on the base layer, except for the parts where multilayer wire crossing was used. In this paper the concept of multilayer wire crossing has been extended to design logic gates in multilayers. Using a 5-input majority gate in a multilayer, a 1-bit and 2-bit adder have been designed in the proposed multilayer gate design paradigm. A comparison has been made with some adders reported previously in the literature and it has been shown that circuits designed in the proposed design paradigm are much more efficient in terms of area, the requirement of QCA cells in the design and the input-output delay of the circuit. Over all, the availability of one additional spatial dimension makes the design process much more flexible and there is scope for the customizability of logic gate designs to make the circuit compact.     

Self-repairing adder using fault localization

In this paper we propose an area-efficient self-repairing adder that can repair multiple faults and identify the particular faulty full adder. Fault detection and recovery has been carried out using self-checking full adders that can diagnose the fault based on internal functionality, independent of a fault propagated through carry. The idea was motivated by the common design problem of fault propagation due to carry in various approaches by self-checking adders. Such a fault can create problems in detecting the particular faulty full adder, and we need to replace the entire adder when an error is detected. We apply our self-checking full adder to a carry-select adder (CSeA) and show that the resulting self-checking CSeA consumes 15% less area compared to the previously proposed self-checking CSeA approach without fault localization. After observing fault localization with reduced area overhead, we utilize the self-checking full adder in constructing a self-repairing adder. It has been observed that our proposed self-repairing 16-bit adder can handle up to four faults effectively, with an 80% probability of error recovery compared to triple modular redundancy, which can handle only a single fault at a time.     

Designing novel reversible BCD adder and parallel adder/subtraction using new reversible logic gates

Reversible logic has received much attention in recent years when calculation with minimum energy consumption is considered. Especially, interest is sparked in reversible logic by its applications in some technologies, such as quantum computing, low-power CMOS design, optical information processing and nanotechnology. This article proposes two new reversible logic gates, ZRQ and NC. The first gate ZRQ not only implements all Boolean functions but also can be used to design optimised adder/subtraction architectures. One of the prominent functionalities of the proposed ZRQ gate is that it can work by itself as a reversible full adder/subtraction unit. The second gate NC can complete overflow detection logic of Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) adder. This article proposes two approaches to design novel reversible BCD adder using new reversible gates. A comparative result which is presented shows that the proposed designs are more optimised in terms of number of gates, garbage outputs, quantum costs and unit delays than the existing designs.     

Design of nanopipelined adder based on resonant tunneling diode

Due to the negative differential resistance exhibited by resonant tunneling diode (RTD), RTD is suited to implement the threshold gates and increases the functionality of a single gate. Recently, multi-threshold threshold gates (MTTGs) and generalized threshold gates (GTGs) have been proposed, which extend the circuit applications of RTDs. In this paper, a new RTD full adder structure with three logic modules is proposed. Based on this structure, four different adders are built with the combination of different module circuits based on MTTG and GTG. From the simulation results, one of the proposed circuits with GTG structure, namely FA_GG, has the best performance, which reduces 27.7–45.9% power-delay product value in comparison with the previous designs.     

Design and analysis of low power high-speed 1-bit full adder cells for VLSI applications

This paper presents a low power and high speed two hybrid 1-bit full adder cells employing both pass transistor and transmission gate logics. These designs aim to minimise power dissipation and reduce transistor count while at the same time reducing the propagation delay. The proposed full adder circuits utilise 16 and 14 transistors to achieve a compact circuit design. For 1.2 V supply voltage at 0.18-μm CMOS technology, the power consumption is 4.266 μW was found to be extremely low with lower propagation delay 214.65 ps and power-delay product (PDP) of 0.9156 fJ by the deliberate use of CMOS inverters and strong transmission gates. The results of the simulation illustrate the superiority of the newly designed 1-bit adder circuits against the reported conservative adder structures in terms of power, delay, power delay product (PDP) and a transistor count. The implementation of 8-bit ripple carry adder in view of proposed full adders are finally verified and was observed to be working efficiently with only 1.411 ns delay. The performance of the proposed circuits was examined using Mentor Graphics Schematic Composer at 1.2 V single ended supply voltage and the model parameters of a TSMC 0.18-μm CMOS.     

Design and simulation of sequential circuits in quantum-dot cellular automata: Falling edge-triggered flip-flop and counter study

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is an emerging nanotechnology, with extremely small feature size and ultralow power consumption comparing with transistor-based technology. Anteriority, basic level-triggered flip-flop designs based on QCA implementation were examined. In this paper, we utilize the unique QCA characteristics and clock zones to design falling edge-triggered J-K flip-flop that is stable and practical. Simulation with the QCADesigner simulator is performed to verify the functionality of the proposed falling edge-triggered flip-flop. This paper also explores the design of counters. Synchronous counters are designed with several different bit sizes and simulation results demonstrate the validity of them.     

Exploiting binary functionality in quaternary look-up tables for increased functional density in multiple-valued logic FPGAs

A full adder is used to demonstrate a programming technique using binary functionality for increased functional density in quaternary look-up table-based field programmable gated arrays (FPGAs). The potential inefficiencies of using quaternary level functionality for these architectures are also illustrated.