Magnetic QCA Majority Voter feasibility analysis

M. Vacca, D. Vighetti, M. Mascarino, L.G. Amaru, M. Graziano, M. Zamboni
2011 2011 7th Conference on Ph.D. Research in Microelectronics and Electronics  
With the continuous scaling of CMOS transistors size, the interest on emerging technologies is rapidly arising. Among the "beyond CMOS" alternatives, Quantum dot Cellular Automata represent an innovative way to implement digital circuits. Particularly, the magnetic implementation (MQCA) favours the fabrication of circuits with a tiny power dissipation and with intrinsic memory capability. Despite many works have already demonstrated the possibility to fabricate this kind of circuits, many
more » ... s are still required to obtain a better comprehension of the design issues related to the basic logic blocks. In this contribution we deeply analyse the key logic gate of MQCA circuits, the Majority Voter (MV), taking into account its physical feasibility and its consequent expected performance. Detailed simulations of the MV are here reported, based on accurate finite-elements micromagnetic simulators; in order to demonstrate the range of operation of the device the distance among nanomagnets and their aspect ratio are used as key parameters. This range of operation represents the technological tolerance that the fabrication process must respect. We have also performed a timing analysis of the gate, demonstrating not only the absolute delay of the circuit, but also the delays obtained with different input configurations. Results show how the delay of the gate changes if the distances between neighbour magnets si varied, demonstrating that the choice of the distances must be carefully done in order to balance the physical feasibility and the gate delay.
doi:10.1109/prime.2011.5966275 fatcat:v2ifdwposre7th56wu3i75ofpe