From Truth Tables to Programming Languages: Progress in the Design of Reversible Circuits

It is a widely supported prediction that conventional computer hardware technologies are going to reach their limits in the near future. Consequently, researchers are working on alternatives. Reversible circuits are one promising direction with applications e.g. in low-power design or quantum computation. However, no real design flow for this new kind of circuits exists so far. In this paper, the progress in the development of design methods for reversible circuits is reviewed - with a particular focus on the synthesis steps. After a brief review on reversible circuits, the general idea of common synthesis approaches is described. This includes methods based on truth table descriptions, methods applicable to larger functions, and finally an approach based on a programming language. Discussions and an outlook to future work conclude this paper.