Applying inherent capabilities of quantum-dot cellular automata to design: D flip-flop case study

Nowadays, quantum cellular automata (QCA) has been considered as the pioneer technology in next generation computer designs. QCA provides the computer computations at nano level using molecular components as computation units. Although the QCA technology provides smaller chip area and eliminates the spatial constraints than earlier CMOS technology, but different characteristics and design limitations of QCA architectures have led to essential attentions in replacement of traditional structures with QCA ones. Inherent information flow control, limited wire length, and consumed area are of such features and restrictions. In this paper, D flip-flop structure has been considered and we have proposed two new D flip-flop structures which employ the inherent capabilities of QCA in timing and data flow control, rather than ordinary replacement of CMOS elements with equivalent QCA ones. The introduced structures involve small number of cells in contrast to earlier proposed ones in presence of the same or even lower input to output delay. The proposed structures are simulated using the QCADesigner and the validity of them has been proved.