Improvement Over CMOS
Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology has been the industry standard for implementing Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) devices for the last two decades, mainly due to the consequences of miniaturization of such devices (i.e. increasing switching speeds, increasing complexity and decreasing power consumption). Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA) is only one of the many alternative technologies proposed as a replacement solution to the fundamental limits CMOS technology will impose in the years to come.
Although QCA solves most of the limitations of CMOS technology, it also brings its own. Research suggests that intrinsic switching time of a QCA cell is at best in the order of terahertz. However, the actual speed may be much lower, in the order of megahertz for solid state QCA and gigahertz for molecular QCA, due to the proper quasi-adiabatic clock switching frequency setting. Additionally, solid-state QCA devices cannot operate at room temperature. The only alternative to this temperature limitation is the recently proposed “Molecular QCA” which theoretically has an inter-dot distance of 2 nm and an inter-cell distance of 6 nm. Molecular QCA is also considered to be the only feasible implementation method for mass production of QCA devices.
Read more about this topic: Quantum Dot Cellular Automaton
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