A multi-objective synthesis methodology in quantum-dot cellular automata technology

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) has been widely advocated in nanotechnology as a response to the physical limits associated with complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology in atomic scales. Some of its peculiar features are its smaller size, higher speed, higher switching frequency, lower power consumption, and higher scale integration. In this technology, the majority and NOT gates are employed for the production of the functions as these two gates together make a universal set of Boolean primitives in QCA technology. An important step in the generation of Boolean functions using the majority gate is reducing the number of involved gates. In this paper, a multi-objective synthesis methodology (with the objective priority of gate counts, gate levels and the number of NOT gates) is presented for finding the minimal number of possible majority gates in the synthesis of Boolean functions using the proposed Majority Specification Matrix (MSM) concept. Moreover, based on MSM, a synthesis flow is proposed for the synthesis of multi-output Boolean functions. To reveal the efficiency of the proposed method, it is compared with a meta-heuristic method, multi-objective Genetic Programing (GP). Besides, it is applied to synthesize MCNC benchmark circuits. The results are indicative of the outperformance of the proposed method in comparison to multi-objective GP method. Also, for the MCNC benchmark circuits, there is an average reduction of 10.5% in the number of levels as well as 16.8% and 33.5% in the number of majority and NOT gates, as compared to the best available method respectively.