Synthesizing Reversible Circuits for Irreversible Functions

Many reversible circuit synthesis procedures have been proposed. A common feature of most methods is that the initial specification must be a completely-specified reversible function. However, often the desired functionality is a, possibly incompletely-specified, irreversible function. In this paper, we consider how to fully automate the process of synthesizing a reversible function given an irreversible specification with particular emphasis on how to embed an irreversible function into a reversible specification. Systematic procedures are presented and results for benchmark problems show the methods produce very good results compared to earlier methods.