Skipping Embedding in the Design of Reversible Circuits

Abstract

Synthesis of reversible circuits finds application in many promising domains but has to deal with the fact that the underlying circuits require a unique mapping from the inputs to the outputs. Existing solutions addressed this problem by additionally performing a so-called embedding process prior to synthesis or by naively mapping building blocks of conventional logic to their corresponding reversible counterparts. This leads to solutions that either suffer from limited scalability or yield circuits with a huge number of additionally required circuit lines. In this work, we conduct investigations to overcome these problems. To this end, we simply ignore the fact that an arbitrary Boolean function to be synthesized might be non-reversible and deal with the resulting problem of ensuring a unique input/output mapping during the actual synthesis process. Experimental evaluations indicate that, following this approach, could provide the basis for an alternative synthesis scheme that allows for synthesizing arbitrary Boolean functions in reasonable time and without the need of a prior embedding process.