SEU Effects on QCA Circuits

Abstract

Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA) represents an emerging technology at the nano technology level. Nowadays, many applications and design methods of QCA technology are introduced. Defect tolerant design of QCA circuits is a challenging case. Here, we will investigate the effects of Single Event Upsets (SEU) on QCA circuits and the defects which may occur.

QCAPUF: QCA-based physically unclonable function as a hardware security primitive

“…Defects are possible to occur in both phases. The synthesis phase may result in intra-cell synthesis defects [28,29], such as dot/electron omission and dot misplacement, and also the deposition phase may cause cell deposition defects [30][31][32][33], such as cell displacement, cell misalignment, cell omission, and cell rotation. However, defects are much more likely to occur during the deposition phase because of its inherent property [34,56].…”

“…Each QCA cell consists of four quantum-dots, in which the diagonal configuration of two mobile electrons will define the polarization state as logic 0 or logic 1. However, QCA circuits are often closely related to the occurrence of functionality errors due to random cell defects [28][29][30][31][32][33] that are caused by manufacturing process variations. In recent years, several studies [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43] focus on methodologies to demonstrate the fault-tolerance characteristics of QCA building blocks and circuits by examining them in the presence of one or more of possible defects.…”

LUT-Based QCA Implementation of a 4×4 S-Box

“…4. Each cell in the zone is latched and unlatched synchronized with the changing clock signal and therefore the information is propagated through cells [7][8][9][10].…”

Radiation Effects in Nano Inverter Gate

“…This is the main defect caused by SEEs which may occur for QCA devices and circuits. Considering the QCA structure with two electrons in each cell, we can conclude that defected cells may lead to circuit malfunctioning [8].…”