An energy-efficient RAM cell based on novel majority gate in QCA technology

Abstract

The limitations of the Complementary Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor (CMOS) technology such as the dissipated power, hard lithography, and short channel effects, led the researchers to look for an alternative technology. The unique properties of the QCA technology such as low dissipated power, speed, and the small feature size were the reason for considering it as a CMOS alternative in this work. In this paper, a new layout for five input single layer majority gate is proposed. The proposed majority gate is used in order to carry out new low power RAM cell with the ability to set the output or to reset it. Designing a cost efficient memory cell is an important issue because it is a brick unit for the whole RAM that considers the most essential component in the digital system. The proposed RAM cell shows improvement around 7% in terms of cost function and a noticeable reduction in switching energy. The QCADesigner tool is used in this work for circuit design and verification while the QCAPro tool is used for power analysis.