An introduction to reversible circuit design

After decades of continuous improvements and shrinking feature sizes, the development of conventional computing technologies faces enormous challenges. In particular, power dissipation in today's computer chips becomes crucial. Reversible computation is a promising alternative to these technologies, where power dissipation can be reduced or even eliminated. Furthermore, reversible logic builds the basis for quantum computation — a completely new way of processing which enables to solve certain problems exponentially faster compared to conventional methods. However, the design of reversible and quantum circuits is significantly different. Thus, new methods e.g. for synthesis, optimization, or verification are needed. This paper provides a brief introduction into reversible circuits and their respective design methods that have been proposed within the last years.