Design of an efficient QCA-based median filter with energy dissipation analysis

Abstract

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) technology is emerging nanotechnology for designing low-power digital circuits and various high-performance calculations at the nanoscale dimension, as it is termed as an emerging technology in Digital Image Processing (DIP) due to having advantages like less area occupancy, low energy dissipation, and high speed as compared with conventional transistor-based technologies. This paper demonstrates the design & implementation of median filter (MF) using QCA technology. The MF plays an important role in DIP for the reduction in noise. The proposed QCA-based MF is designed in a single layer with less cell count and low latency. The MF is designed by using Compare and Selective Module (CSM). The proposed 1-bit,  2-bit & 4-bit CSM architectures occupy the area of $0.17,~ 0.52 \& 3.25 \mu m^2$ and use 118,  380 & 1963 QCA cells, respectively. The proposed CSM is further extended to a larger bit size. The QCA Designer-E simulation tool has been used to design, and verify all the proposed architectures. The energy dissipation has been simulated using a coherent vector engine setup. The total energy dissipation of 1-bit,  2-bit & 4-bit CSM architecture is $2.56 \times 10^{{ - 2}} ,1.35 \times 10^{{ - 1}} ~\,\& \,~5.19 \times 10^{{ - 1}} eV$, and the average energy dissipation is $2.31 \times 10^{{ - 3}} ,\,~1.22 \times 10^{{ - 2}} \,\& \,{\text{4}}.{\text{71}} \times {\text{10}}^{{{\text{ - 2}}}} {\text{eV}}$, respectively. The total   &  average energy dissipation per cycle of the proposed MF is $41.72 \times 10^{{ - 1}} ~\,\& \,38.26 \times 10^{{ - 2}} eV$, respectively.