Fredkin-Enabled Transformation-Based Reversible Logic Synthesis

Reversible computation is gaining increasing relevance in the context of several post-CMOS technologies, the most prominent of those being quantum computing. The problem of implementing a given Boolean function using a set of elementary reversible logic gates is known as reversible logic synthesis. Due to the presumed hardness of the reversible circuit synthesis problem, different heuristics have been proposed in the literature to reduce quantum cost (QC), gate count, and logical depth without using ancillary lines. Interestingly, none of these heuristics systematically utilize Fredkin gates. In this paper, we demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that accommodating Fredkin gates significantly improves the performance of reversible circuits.