Energy estimation of QCA circuits: An investigation with multiplexers

Abstract Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a rival to complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-based technology and one of the most cutting-edge nano-scale technologies. The multiplexer is a fundamental component in the fields of nano communication and nano computation. The investigative item of this article is the QCA multiplexer, and a handful of the best multiplexers were chosen as samples for the current experiment. The QCA layouts were designed in the QCADesigner-2.0.3 simulation engine environment, and the best one was reported after successfully experimenting on a total of eight samples. The co-ordinate-based energy was estimated using QCADesigner-E (QDE), and the non-adiabatic energy waste was investigated using QCAPro. According to the coordinates-based technique, the overall energy waste of the best energy-saving QCA multiplexer is 5.90 meV, with an average energy loss per cycle of 0.537 meV. Another approach, QCAPro-based, was used to estimate the energy loss at three different levels of tunneling at a constant temperature, yielding an overall energy loss of approximately 12 to 15 meV for the energy-efficient multiplexers..