A study of optimal 4-bit reversible circuit synthesis from mixed-polarity Toffoli gates

Optimal synthesis of reversible circuits is a very hard task. In 2010, a method and a tool of practical usage for finding optimal circuits built from multi-control Toffoli gates for any 4-bit reversible specification were finally developed. In 2011 we published an extension to the algorithm, which allows to reduce the quantum cost of the resulting circuits. In this paper we present another extension to this approach. Namely, we have extended the reversible gate library to mixed-polarity multi-control Toffoli gates (i.e. with both positive and negative controls). Our experimental results for the known reversible benchmarks show that using mixed-polarity Toffoli gates gives significant savings in gate count. The paper presents standard computational experiments for circuit synthesis. These results have implications in testing synthesis algorithms for reversible mixed-polarity circuits and quantum circuits.