Synthesis of reversible circuits with minimal lines for large functions

Reversible circuits are an emerging technology where all computations are performed in an invertible manner. Motivated by their promising applications, e.g. in the domain of quantum computation or in the low-power design, the synthesis of such circuits has been intensely studied. However, how to automatically realize reversible circuits with the minimal number of lines for large functions is an open research problem. In this paper, we propose a new synthesis approach which relies on concepts that are complementary to existing ones. While “conventional” function representations have been applied for synthesis so far (such as truth tables, ESOPs, BDDs), we exploit Quantum Multiple-valued Decision Diagrams (QMDDs) for this purpose. An algorithm is presented that performs transformations on this data-structure eventually leading to the desired circuit. Experimental results show the novelty of the proposed approach through enabling automatic synthesis of large reversible functions with the minimal number of circuit lines. Furthermore, the quantum cost of the resulting circuits is reduced by 50% on average compared to an existing state-of-the-art synthesis method.