Novel design and simulation of reversible ALU in quantum dot cellular automata

Quantum dot cellular automata (QCA) technology is considered as one of the most suitable replacements to reduce the CMOS-based digital circuit design problems at the nanoscale due to its tiny size, fast, latency and very low power consumption. One of the main components of microprocessors is the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and in other words, it acts as the heart of microprocessors. This paper presents a QCA technology-based reversible ALU unit using basic reversible blocks and a novel reversible block namely BS1 Block. The proposed block performs logic and arithmetic operations in the proposed scheme. The simulations of the proposed design are carried out by QCA Designer. According to the simulated results, the proposed structure has a 35%, 27% and 30% improvement in quantum cost, the number of cells and the occupied area in comparison to the previous conducted researches, respectively.