Improving the mapping of reversible circuits to quantum circuits using multiple target lines

The efficient synthesis of quantum circuits is an active research area. Since many of the known quantum algorithms include a large Boolean component (e.g. the database in the Grover search algorithm), quantum circuits are commonly synthesized in a two-stage approach. First, the desired function is realized as a reversible circuit making use of existing synthesis methods for this domain. Afterwards, each reversible gate is mapped to a functionally equivalent quantum gate cascade. In this paper, we propose an improved mapping of reversible circuits to quantum circuits which exploits a certain structure of many reversible circuits. In fact, it can be observed that reversible circuits are often composed of similar gates which only differ in the position of their target lines. We introduce an extension of reversible gates which allow multiple target lines in a single gate. This enables a significantly cheaper mapping to quantum circuits. Experiments show that considering multiple target lines leads to improvements of up to 85% in the resulting quantum cost.