Modelling of environmental effects on silicon dangling bond quantum cellular automata circuits and development of simulation tools

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Founded in 2011 and located in Edmonton Canada, Quantum Silicon Inc. (QSI) is the world's first commercial developer of quantum-dot computing devices based on silicon dangling bond technology. These devices operate at an atomic scale without the conventional current consumption of CMOS-based electronics, thereby offering advantages of higher speed and lower power consumptions than industry standard computing devices. Different methods of employing quantum dots to extend computational abilities beyond the limits imposed by CMOS fabrication processes have been refined over the past 2 decades, but QSI's technology is unique in that it employs silicon dangling bonds on a H-Si(001) surface to act as the quantum dots. In so doing, precise assemblies of such dots can be created to form complex circuits that perform binary functions by employing the well known quantum dot cellular automata (QCA) computing scheme. To date, extensive research has gone into designing a wide variety of QCA circuits without a suitable means of fabrication. QSI's technology therefore offers all new potential to realize QCA circuits and take practical advantage of circuit design CAD tools that have already been developed. In light of this situation, modification and taylorization of current QCA CAD tools to simulating circuits based on QSI's dangling bond technology is important for purposes of designing and debugging. At the moment, methods of simulating QCA circuit behaviour rarely account for the effects of the environment (decoherence) on circuit operation imposed by a specific physical implementation, but instead tend to make rough approximations of generic thermal effects or ignore them all together. Therefore, in the case of silicon dangling bond technology, there is no existing analysis of how thermal interaction between silicon dangling bond quantum dots and their silicon lattice substrate influences circuit performance. This project aims to develop these models and incorporate them into the CAD tool QCADesigner allowing QSI engineers to better understand the circuit level behavior.