High Level Exploration of Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA)

In this work, we present a high level evaluation of an emerging nanotechnology to determine a set of technology requirements. The technology under question is Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA). As a vehicle, we present two different QCA circuits and evaluate the technology requirements based on the specifications of these circuits. These circuits are a simple 4-bit arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and a 4/spl times/4 memory which are building blocks to more complex systems such as a computer central processing unit (CPU).