Towards a Design Flow for Reversible Logic

This book presents contributions to a design flow for reversible logic, including advanced methods for synthesis, optimization, verification, and debugging. It proposes several techniques for synthesis of very large functions in reversible logic.

The development of computing machines found great success in the last decades. But the ongoing miniaturization of integrated circuits will reach its limits in the near future. Shrinking transistor sizes and power dissipation are the major barriers in the development of smaller and more powerful circuits. Reversible logic p- vides an alternative that may overcome many of these problems in the future. For low-power design, reversible logic offers signi?cant advantages since zero power dissipation will only be possible if computation is reversible. Furthermore, quantum computation pro?ts from enhancements in this area, because every quantum circuit is inherently reversible and thus requires reversible descriptions. However, since reversible logic is subject to certain restrictions (e.g. fanout and feedback are not directly allowed), the design of reversible circuits signi?cantly differs from the design of traditional circuits. Nearly all steps in the design ?ow (like synthesis, veri?cation, or debugging) must be redeveloped so that they become applicable to reversible circuits as well. But research in reversible logic is still at the beginning. No continuous design ?ow exists so far. Inthisbook,contributionstoadesign?owforreversiblelogicarepresented.This includes advanced methods for synthesis, optimization, veri?cation, and debugging.

Currently, no other book considers several design steps of reversible circuits within an integrated flow Proposes several techniques for synthesis of very large functions in reversible logic So far, synthesis was only possible for small functions Questions like debugging of reversible logic have been considered for the first time Reversible logic is an emerging area. Once this kind of technology advances from the academic level to the industrial level, these approaches are required Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Preliminaries.- Synthesis of Reversible Logic.- Exact Synthesis of Reversible Logic.- Embedding of Irreversible Functions.- Optimization.- Formal Verification and Debugging.- Summary and Conclusions.