QCA-Based RAM Design Using a Resilient Reversible Gate with Improved Performance

Abstract

Reversible logic and Quantum dot cellular automata are the prospective pillars of quantum computing. These paradigms can potentially reduce the size and power of the future chips while simultaneously maintaining the high speed. RAM cell is a crucial component of computing devices. Design of a RAM cell using a blend of reversible logic and QCA technology will surpass the limitations of conventional RAM structure. This motivates us to explore the design of a RAM cell using reversible logic in QCA framework. The performance of a reversible circuit can be improved by utilizing a resilient reversible gate. This paper presents the design of QCA-based reversible RAM cell using an efficient, fault-tolerant and low power reversible gate. Initially, a novel reversible gate is proposed and implemented in QCA. The QCA layout of the proposed reversible gate is designed using a unique multiplexer circuit. Further, a comprehensive analysis of the gate is carried out for standard Boolean functions, cost function and power dissipation and it has been found that the proposed gate is 75.43% more cost-effective and 58.54% more energy-efficient than the existing reversible gates. To prove the inherent testability of the proposed gate, its rigorous testing is carried out against various faults and the proposed gate is found to be 69.2% fault-tolerant. For all the performance parameters, the proposed gate has performed considerably better than the existing ones. Furthermore, the proposed gate is explicitly used for designing reversible D latch and RAM cell, which are crucial modules of sequential logic circuits. The proposed latch is 45.4% more cost effective than the formerly reported D latch. The design of QCA-based RAM cell using reversible logic is novel and not reported earlier in the literature.