A Novel QCA Design of Energy-Efficient Three-Input AND/OR Circuit

One of the nanoscale technologies that shows its capability of implementing integrated digital circuits with low power, high speed, and high density is quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA). The fundamental device for designing and implementing circuits in QCA is majority logic. In this paper, a novel energy-efficient QCA design of three-input AND/OR logic functions is proposed. This design can perform both AND and OR logic operations using the same structure with an achievement of 58% and 64% approximate reductions in power consumption compared to majority-based structures, and 31% and 32% approximate reductions in power consumption compared to the best available circuits, respectively. In addition, other physical constraints such as area and latency are improved and have better or similar results compared to the best existing circuits. The proposed circuit can be considered as a fundamental and better alternative to the majority gate for energy-efficient circuit design in QCA. This will pave the way for developing efficient large-scale QCA-based sequential and combinational circuits.