Defect Properties and Design Tools for Quantum Dot Cellular Automata

While the end of Moore's law has been predicted for many years, it appears that transistors may finally hit physical scaling and packing density limits in the next ten to twenty years. This possibility has led to the development of many nanoelectronic devices such as carbon nanotubes, single electron transistors, molecular transistors, and quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA), among others. One common issue with these nanoelectronic devices is that many manufacturing defects are likely to occur. To this end, defect-tolerant architectures for nanoelectronic systems will be required. In order to study how QCA wires could be made defect tolerant, the possible manufacturing defects were identified, and models to represent these defects were found. However, to perform simulation, QCA design tools were expanded by developing a file format framework capable of separating the system architecture from the technology used to implement the system. This file format framework was developed using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). In this work, QCA wires of varying widths are examined to determine their resistance to certain individual defects and a specific subclass of manufacturing defects: missing cells. The results show that ``wide' wires, at least to five cells wide, can be used to offer inherent defect tolerance in a QCA system.