Computer-Aided Design of Ternary Quantum-dot Cellular Automata Circuits

This article builds on the ternary quantum-dot cell, which is an extension of the classic binary cell. These cells are basic building blocks of quantum-dot cellular automata. They can be be used to construct structures with input and output cells, so when using the ternary quantum-dot cells a structure is an implementation of some ternary logic function. Furthermore the structures can be interconnected and act as building blocks of the implementation of an arbitrary logic function. This paper presents a computer-aided design tool that finds an optimal implementation of a circuit. The search is based on the concept of iterative deepening. Since searching over all possible solutions would take too much time, heuristics are used to reduce the required computation time.