A new gate for low cost design of all-optical reversible logic circuit

Reversible computing offers a possible solution for high performance computing and low power consumption. For hardware implementation of reversible logic, optical computers are emerging as one of the promising alternative. Recently, in the literature, reversible logic gates and combinational circuits have been proposed in optical domain using Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) based Mach Zehnder interferometer (MZI) switches due to its significant advantages such as high speed, low power, fast switching and ease of fabrication. Optical reversible designs have used ad-hoc approaches and require high cost in terms of MZI switches, Beam Splitters (BS), and Beam Combiners (BC) as well as optical delay. In this work, an optical reversible MNOT gate and all-optical realization of 4×4 Toffoli Gate have been proposed which is used in all-optical realization of optimized reversible combinational circuits. A general design approach to realize all-optical reversible circuits based on MZI switches has been proposed first time in the literature. Optimized all-optical reversible 2×1 multiplexer and full adder circuits have been designed using these proposed gates and design approach. All-optical reversible designs of 4×1 multiplexer, 1×4 Demultiplexer and 3to8 Decoder circuits have also been presented in this work first time in the literature. Our results have shown significant improvements over existing designs in terms of MZI switches, BS, BC and optical delay.