Towards VHDL-based Design of Reversible Circuits

Hardware Description Languages (HDL) facilitate the design of complex circuits and allow for scalable synthesis. While rather established for conventional circuits, HDLs for reversible circuits are in their infancy and usually require a deep understanding of the reversible computing concepts. This motivates the question whether reversible circuits can also efficiently be designed with conventional HDLs, such as VHDL. This work discusses this question. By this, it provides the basis towards a design flow that requires no or only little knowledge of the reversible computation paradigm which could ease the acceptance of this non-conventional computation paradigm amongst designers and stakeholders.