Exploiting Reversible Logic Design for Implementing Adiabatic Circuits

Today, energy saving is a major design target, since the number of mobile- or power-independent devices is increasing. These devices should operate as long as possible with one battery charge. Especially for designs where speed is of secondary importance, adiabatic circuits are a promising alternative. These kind of circuits are rather slow but extremely energy efficient. However, the full potential of adiabatic circuits can only be fully exploited if computations are conducted in a reversible fashion. This is not the case for conventional circuits which are usually composed of non-reversible gates such as AND, OR, etc. At the same time, design methods for so-called reversible circuits received significant interest – mainly motivated by emerging technologies such as quantum computation or encoder design. In this work, we exploit the accomplishments of these complementary areas and, realize fully reversible adiabatic circuits. Experimental evaluations show that this yields circuits which have a substantially smaller power consumption than conventional circuit technologies.