Compact and energy-efficient QCA architectures for full adder and carry-save adder: single-layer designs optimised for nanoscale circuits
摘要
Shrinking CMOS devices face fundamental scaling limitations, including weakened electrostatic control and increased leakage currents, which in turn drive the exploration of alternative, non-charge-transport computing paradigms. Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) offers a compelling alternative by encoding logic in cell polarisation, promising ultra-low energy and extreme density. This work introduces single-layer QCA architectures for the full adder (QCAFA) and carry-save adder (CSA) that explicitly minimise delay, area, and cell complexity. The designs exploit clock-aware majority/inverter networks and layout regularity to eliminate multilayer crossovers and reduce routing congestion, enabling compact, pipeline-friendly arithmetic blocks suitable for ALUs, multipliers, and MAC units. Using QCADesigner 2.0.3 and QCADesigner-E, the proposed QCAFA achieves 46 cells with 0.04 μm² area, 0.25 clock-cycle latency, and markedly reduced quantum cost, representing a 34.29% cell reduction relative to strong recent baselines. Likewise, the CSA requires only 424 cells within 0.56 μm², delivering an 18.62% reduction in cell count against its best-known counterpart while sustaining 1.75 clock-cycle latency. Energy-dissipation analysis indicates low total/average energies (QCAFA: 1.31/1.10 eV; CSA: 3.66/3.50 eV), and temperature sweeps confirm stable output polarisation across 1–7 K, underscoring robustness under canonical QCA operating conditions. Comprehensive benchmarking against state-of-the-art single and multilayer designs verifies consistent gains in cell count, area utilisation, quantum cost, and delay. By uniting single-layer manufacturability with system-level efficiency, these adders advance QCA from component-level novelty toward practical nanoscale arithmetic fabrics, charting a credible pathway for energy-efficient, densely integrated post-CMOS computing.