Design of an Efficient Multilayer Arithmetic Logic Unit in Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA)

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is a new nano-scale technology that due to making significant improvements in the design of electronic circuits can be considered as an appropriate alternative to CMOS technology. The arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a fundamental component of the central processing unit to carry out the arithmetic and logical operations that multiplexer and full adder play an important role in its operations. In this brief, based on the extracted features of the arithmetic operations of the ALU, we propose a new special low-complexity QCA 4: 1 multiplexer, which is application-specific to the proposed ALU. Moreover, a new QCA full adder is proposed based on the cell interaction. Likewise, a QCA multilayer ALU structure is designed based on the validated proposed structures to carry out four logical and eight arithmetic operations. The functional correctness of the proposed structures are evaluated by QCADesigner tool; also, QCAPro as an accurate power estimator tool is applied to investigate their power dissipation. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed structures outperform in comparison to counterpart designs in terms of cell number, area, latency, and power consumption.