Energy Analysis of QCA Circuits for Reversible Computing

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a promising nanochnology that offers significant improvements in diverse areas (such as power dissipation) over CMOS. Recently, QCA has been advocated as a potential candidate technology for implementing reversible computing. However, existing tools for QCA design and evaluation have limited capabilities. A simple but versatile mechanical-based model has been proposed in the past for computing in QCA. This paper presents a thermodynamic analysis using this mechnical QCA model. Different circuits are analyzed for reversible computing. As applicable to QCA, two clocking schemes, namely Landauer clocking and Bennett clocking, are analyzed for energy dissipation and performance.