Reliability and Defect Tolerance in Metallic Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata

Conventional transistor-based CMOS technology faces great challenges with the down-scaling of device sizes in recent years. Issues such as quantum effects, dopant-induced disorder, and power dissipation may hinder further progress in scaling microelectronics. As the scaling approaches a molecular level, a new paradigm beyond using current switches to encode binary information may be needed. Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) [1–3, 5, 11, 12, 15, 18] emerges as one such a paradigm. In the QCA approach bit information is encoded in the charge configuration within a cell. Columbic interaction between cells is sufficient to accomplish the computation; no current flows out of the cell. It has been shown that very low power dissipation is possible [14].