Design of Reversible Synchronous Sequential Circuits Using Pseudo Reed-Muller Expressions

Abstract

Reversible logic has become very promising for low-power design using emerging computing technologies. A number of good works have been reported on reversible combinational circuit design. However, only a few works reported on the design of reversible latches and flip-flops on the top of reversible combinational gates and suggested that sequential circuits be built by replacing the latches and flip-flops and associated combinational gates of the traditional irreversible designs by their reversible counter parts. This replacement technique is not very promising, because it leads to high quantum cost and garbage outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of designing synchronous sequential circuits directly from reversible gates using pseudo Reed-Muller expressions representing the state transition and the output functions of the circuit. We present designs of arbitrary synchronous sequential circuit as well as practically important sequential circuits such as counters and registers. It is found that our direct designs save 1.54%-49.09% quantum cost and 51.43%-81.82% garbage outputs than the replacement design approach suggested earlier.