Analysis of power dissipation in clocked Quantum Cellular Automaton circuits

We investigate power dissipation in quantum cellular automaton (QCA) circuits, focusing on the clocked version, and including also the contribution from the nonunitary efficiency of the charging process. The dissipated energy is computed from an integration on the V-Q plane over a complete clock cycle. Results show that power dissipation in a QCA cell, also including the efficiency of the refrigerator needed to cool down the QCA circuit to the operating temperature, appears to be a few orders of magnitude smaller than those typical of traditional technologies. A fairer comparison, however, must take into account also the number of devices that are needed to accomplish a given functionality and the possibility of operating traditional devices with power saving adiabatic schemes