Modeling magnetic quantum-dot cellular automata by HDL

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is one of the emerging technologies that have been advocated to overcome the physical limitations of CMOS in the nano ranges. For QCA to be a viable alternative to CMOS in the decades ahead, tools and methodologies at physical and logic levels are urgently needed in support of all design phases. This paper presents an HDL based framework and related models to simulate and assess magnetic QCA (MQCA). The tool proposed in this paper extends a currently available tool for electrostatic QCA, thus adding new capabilities related to MQCA. In particular, the proposed tool (referred to as HDLM) is used to design and characterize both the functionally complete gate set and few specific structures that have proposed for the operation of MQCA. Models and functions are proposed for the MQCA cell and the building blocks. The proposed tool is finally used also to design a a novel n-input AND gate in MQCA; its characteristics are simulated and assessed, thus showing the effectiveness of the proposed tool to investigate MQCA.