First Steps in Creating Online Testable Reversible Sequential Circuits

Abstract

Synthesis of reversible sequential circuits is a very new research area. It has been shown that such circuits can be implemented using quantum dot cellular automata. Other work has used traditional designs for sequential circuits and replaced the flip-flops and the gates with their reversible counterparts. Our earlier work uses a direct feedback method without any flip-flops, improving upon the replacement technique in both quantum cost and ancilla inputs. We present here a further improved version of the direct feedback method. Design examples show that the proposed method produces better results than our earlier method in terms of both quantum cost and ancilla inputs. We also propose the first technique for online testing of single line faults in sequential reversible circuits.