Design and analysis of a novel reversible encoder/decoder

Reversible computation differs from traditional computation in that it preserves information while manipulating it. This new design paradigm has very attractive thermodynamic consequences and holds many applications in current and emerging technologies. Modern computers can reduce power consumption by taking advantage of reversibility, and quantum computers operate reversibly. Researchers have already proposed reversible designs of many common arithmetic and logical units, including adders, multipliers, shifters, and even registers. Very little focused work has been done specifically on reversible encoder/decoder design. In this paper we propose a novel reversible encoder/decoder design and analyze it in terms of its quantum cost, garbage outputs, constant inputs, and quantum delay.