Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata Design Guideline

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) can be considered as a candidate for the next generation digital logic implementation technology due to their small feature sizes and ultra low power consumption. Up to now, several designs using QCA technology have been proposed. However, we found not all of the designs function properly. Furthermore, no general design guidelines have been proposed so far. This makes designing a large scale circuits using QCA technology an extremely timeconsuming process. In this paper, we show several critical vulnerabilities related to unbalanced input paths to QCA gates and sneak noise paths in QCA interconnect structures. In order to make up the vulnerabilities, a disciplinary guideline will be proposed.