Innovative design methodologies in quantum‐dot cellular automata

Current transistor-based IC fabrication technology faces many trivial issues such as those of excess power dissipation, expensive fabrication and short channel effects at very low device size [1]. Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA)-based digital electronics on the other hand provide scope for further development in the future by shrinking the device size. Current QCA logic circuits are based on logic synthesis using Inverters and (three or five input) Majority Gates. In this paper, a new design methodology has been described that can be used to create circuits with even greater device substrate densities than what are currently achieved in existing QCA designs. Based on the proposed methodology, a new QCA inverter is proposed. It is further tested through simulations on QCA Designer. Through the simulations, it is subsequently proved to be much more reliable and robust than the presently used common QCA inverter(s). In the second section of this paper, simple QCA circuits such as ring oscillators using odd number of inverters in daisy chains are described and designed using the proposed inverter design. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.