SAT-based Exact Synthesis of Ternary Reversible Circuits using a Functionally Complete Gate Library

Abstract

The problem of synthesis and optimization of reversible and quantum circuits have drawn the attention of researchers for the last two decades due to increasing interest in quantum computing. Although lot of works have been done on the synthesis of binary reversible circuits, very less works have been reported on the synthesis of ternary reversible circuits. Ternary circuits have lower cost of implementation as compared to their binary counterparts. However, the synthesis approaches that exist for ternary reversible circuits either use too many circuit lines (qutrits) or too many gates. Only one prior work has discussed the problem of generating cost-optimal ternary reversible circuits, but for a very restrictive gate library, which limits the approach to a specific subset of ternary reversible functions and often the solution becomes sub-optimal due to the imposed restrictions. The present paper overcomes that restriction, and uses multiple control ternary Toffoli gates with all possible ternary target operations as the gate library. This gate library is functionally complete and can be used to synthesize any arbitrary function. The proposed SAT-based synthesis approach provides low cost solutions in terms of the number of gates for any arbitrary ternary reversible function. Experimental results on various randomly generated permutations as well as standard ternary benchmarks establish this claim. The results can be used as template for other synthesis approaches by observing how far they deviate from the optimal solutions.