Test Pattern Generation Effort Evaluation of Reversible Circuits

Abstract

The problem of synthesis and optimization of reversible and quantum circuits have drawn the attention of researchers for more than one decade. With physical technologies for realizing the quantum bits (qubits) being announced, the problem of testing such circuits is also becoming important. There have been several works for identifying fault models for reversible circuits, and test generation algorithms for the same. In this work, we aim to show that the problem of testing reversible circuits with respect to recent fault models (like missing gate, missing control, reduced control, etc.) is easy, and it is not really worth to spend time and effort for generating better test patterns. To establish this point, test generators using two extreme scenarios have been implemented: a naive test generator that is very fast but does not guarantee optimality and a SAT-based test generator that is slow but guarantees smallest test sets. Experiments have been carried out on reversible benchmark circuits, which establish the fact that the size of the test patterns does not drastically differ across the spectrum.