Design of dual-edge triggered flip-flops based on quantum-dot cellular automata

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) technology has been widely considered as an alternative to complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) due to QCA’s inherent merits.Many interesting QCA-based logic circuits with smaller feature size,higher operating frequency,and lower power consumption than CMOS have been presented.However,QCA is limited in its sequential circuit design with high performance flip-flops.Based on a brief introduction of QCA and dual-edge triggered (DET) flip-flop,we propose two original QCA-based D and JK DET flip-flops,offering the same data throughput of corresponding single-edge triggered (SET) flip-flops at half the clock pulse frequency.The logic functionality of the two proposed flip-flops is verified with the QCADesigner tool.All the proposed QCA-based DET flip-flops show higher performance than their SET counterparts in terms of data throughput.Furthermore,compared with a previous DET D flip-flop,the number of cells,covered area,and time delay of the proposed DET D flip-flop are reduced by 20.5%,23.5%,and 25%,respectively.By using a lower clock pulse frequency,the proposed DET flip-flops are promising for constructing QCA sequential circuits and systems with high performance.