An Efficient Demultiplexer Design in Quantum-dot Cellular Automata

QCA (quantum-dot cellular automata) has gained interest due to its high device density, high operating frequency, and low power consumption in recent years. Demultiplexers are widely used in data communications and signal routing fields. Traditional demultiplexing designs based on QCA technology have been implemented using distinct logic expressions based on majority gates and inverters. However, the implementation of inversion in QCA is costly. In this paper, we propose an efficient 1-2 demultiplexer structure in QCA technology using a Nand-Nor-Inverter (NNI) gate with complementary attributes. Hence, no inverters are required in the proposed 1-2 demultiplexer design. Moreover, we make use of the proposed 1-2 demultiplexer design as a basic module to design 1-4 demultiplexer. The experimental results show that our proposed demultiplexer has an average optimization of 15.27% in terms of QCA cell count, 19.44% in terms of the occupied area, 24.35% in terms of the cost function, and 8.33% in terms of delay compared to the state-of-the-art demultiplexer designs.