Fault-tolerant universal reversible gate design in QCA nanotechnology

•This paper presents a novel concept for the design of a single layered, 3 × 3 universal and reversible gate using QCA nanotechnology. The proposed gate is discussed for the implementation of 7 Boolean standard logic gates and 13 standard Boolean functions. The comparative results are also provided in the manuscript in order to check the importance of the proposed work. The simulation results show that the proposed gate outperforms compared to the existing gates. The important highlights of the proposed work are given as follows:•Design of 3 × 3 universal and reversible gate.•A single layer implementation of gate.•Fault-tolerance analysis for the proposed gate.•Implementation of Boolean standard logic gates.•Outlined the comparative results for logic implementation. Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) nanotechnology is the best suited technology for the nanocomputing applications. The limitations of the conventional transistors in nanoscale region can be removed by QCA nanotechnology. Hence, this paper proposes a novel design and implementation of a 3 × 3 universal and reversible gate in QCA nanotechnology. The proposed gate requires only 39 cells and has a total area of 0.029 µm2 with a latency of 0.25. The proposed gate is evaluated for the various possible defects and the performance parameters. The proposed gate is also compared with the existing gates and the proposed gate is established as the most efficient and productive.