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Binary Adders on Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Prof. C. S. Lent, Univ. Notre Dame, for his inspiring keynote during IEEE SiPS 2006, which initiated the work reported in this paper. In addition, the authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments to improve this paper.

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  1. Department of Computer Systems, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 553, 33101, Tampere, Finland

    Ismo Hänninen & Jarmo Takala

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  1. Ismo Hänninen
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Correspondence to Ismo Hänninen.

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Hänninen, I., Takala, J. Binary Adders on Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata. J Sign Process Syst Sign Image Video Technol 58, 87–103 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0284-5

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