Design and energy estimation of QCA based simple data path selector cum router unit for nano communication

Quantum dot cellular automata (QCA) is promising nanotechnology due to the three main advantages: faster speed, nanoscale size, and ultra-small power consumption. This paper proposed a simple data path selector cum router as the ‘multiplexer-channel-demultiplexer’ unit using QCA, an unavoidable building block of nano communication. A Simple 2×2 block and the extended 4×4 block of data path selectors have been proposed in this article. The layouts of the proposed designs have been verified in QCADesigner, and the energy dissipation has been evaluated using two tools, QCAPro and QCQDesigner-E(QDE). The suggested designs reached a significant improvement in cell complexity (cell count) and covered area over the existing designs. In precise, the proposed 2×2 (4 × 4) block shows 86% (63%) lower cell complexity and 87% (37%) smaller area than the prior reported similar designs. In addition, the currently reported 2 × 2 (4 × 4) unit has 86% (60%) lower QDE based energy dissipation compared with prior reported designs.