XOR gate design in QCA nanotechnology using cell translation method

Conventional metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) devices exhibit short-channel issues and struggle to scale down their dimensions in the ultra-nanoscale regime. To continue the development in the electronics industry, it is needed to shift the conventional transistor technology to another direction, where the transistor-less idea can be implemented for the design of logic circuits. To achieve the goal of high-performance and scalable technology, a transistor-less technology, called quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) nanotechnology, got much attention due to its numerous benefits in comparison to the conventional semiconductor devices. The QCA nanotechnology provides highly dense and fast-operating circuits with minimal energy dissipation. The exclusive OR (XOR) operation is a key logic in digital system design. Therefore, this paper proposes a single-layer; unique XOR gate in the QCA nanotechnology using the idea of cell translation in order to minimize the number of QCA cells and latency, and it is simulated using the QCA Designer-E tool. The proposed XOR gate is further applied for the implementation of half-adder and full-adder circuits and successfully verified their functions. The energy dissipation for all the circuits is estimated using the QCA Pro tool. The proposed designs are compared with the existing designs to outline the importance. The proposed XOR gate minimizes the design cost by 1.21X and energy dissipation by 16.87% at the 1.5 kink energy level as compared to the best-reported work in the literature.