Advisor(s)

Fabrizio Lombardi

Contributor(s)

Yong-Bin Kim, Stefano Basagni, Ali Abur

Date of Award

2008

Date Accepted

11-2008

Degree Grantor

Northeastern University

Degree Level

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department or Academic Unit

College of Engineering. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Keywords

Electrical and computer engineering, Nanotechnology, DNA self-assembly

Subject Categories

Quantum electrodynamics, Self-organizing systems--Data processing

Disciplines

Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering | Computer Engineering

Abstract

Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA) and DNA self-assembly are promising nanotechnologies that are being studied as potential successors to CMOS VLSI technology. Their information processing principles are inspired by new physical (for QCA) and biochemical (DNA self-assembly) phenomena. Because they are radically different from the conventional CMOS based computation, new modeling, design, test and fault tolerance techniques are required. For QCA, modeling, design, testing and fault tolerance are studied while considering the technical background of reversible computing. A mechanical molecular QCA is proposed and applied to the analysis of logic function and energy dissipation of QCA circuits. New reversible gates are designed for QCA implementation. The test of QCA reversible gate array are discussed while test cases under different fault assumptions and array configurations are considered. A fault tolerance scheme called majority-multiplexing is investigated for QCA circuits in terms of fault tolerant capacity, signal restoration speed and implication on the reversibility of circuits. The design and error tolerance of DNA self-assembly are also studied in this dissertation. The logic design of DNA self-assembly system is investigated for using DNA self-assembly as a promising nanoscale manufacturing approach. This design problem is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem and proven to be NP-complete. Greedy algorithms are proposed for this problem. DNA self-assembly system designed using the algorithms may generate errors during assembly and the errors are studied and modeled in this research. DNA self-assembly suffers from high error rate. A new error tolerant technique called (2k-1)x(2k-1) snake redundant block (also known as snake tile set) is proposed. The reduction of error by (2k-1)x(2k-1) snake redundant block is modeled and analyzed. Both analysis and simulation show the error tolerant technique to be effective and efficient.

Document Type

Dissertation

Rights Information

Copyright 2009

Rights Holder

Xiaojun Ma


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