Evaluating the Impact of Interconnections in Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Buchtitel:
Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD)
Original Kurzfassung:
Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA) are an
emerging nanotechnology with remarkable performance and
energy efficiency. Computation and information transfer in QCA
is based on field forces rather than electric currents. As a
consequence, new strategies are required for design automation
approaches in order to cope with the arising challenges. One
of these challenges rises from the fact that QCA is a planar
technology. That means, logic gates as well as interconnection
elements are mostly located in the same layer. Hence, it is
expected that interconnections have higher influence on the final
design costs than in conventional integrated technologies. For
the first time, this paper presents an extensive study on the
quantification of this impact. Therefore, we consider the entire
design flow for QCA circuits from the initial synthesis (using
different synthesis approaches) to the corresponding placement
on a QCA grid. Then, we characterize the respectively obtained
QCA circuits in terms of area, delay and energy costs. The
obtained results indicate that the impact of interconnections in
QCA is indeed substantial. Design costs including or not including
interconnections differ by several orders of magnitudes, which
motivates to completely re-think how logic synthesis for QCA
circuits shall be conducted in the future.
Forschungs-