Towards a Design Flow for Reversible Logic - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lukas Burgholzer works as a research scientist at the Technical University of Munich in the Chair for Design Automation of Robert Wille and as CTO of the Munich Quantum Software Company (MQSC). He received his PhD from JKU Linz, Austria, in 2023 working as part of the Institute for Integrated Circuits as well as the LIT Secure and Correct Systems Lab. His research focuses on design automation tools and software for quantum computing. In these areas, he has published more than 60 papers in international conferences and journals. He is the chief developer of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) as well as one of the technical leads of the Munich Quantum Software Stack (MQSS) project, which is developed as part of the Munich Quantum Valley (MQV) initiative. For his research, he was awarded the EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award, the Heinz Zemanek Prize, and more. Robert Wille is a Full and Distinguished Professor at the Technical University of Munich, CEO of the Munich Quantum Software Company (MQSC), and Scientific Director at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg. He received his Diploma and Dr.-Ing. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Bremen, Germany, in 2006 and 2009, respectively. His academic journey has included positions at the University of Bremen, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the University of Applied Sciences Bremen, the University of Potsdam, and the Technical University Dresden. From 2015 to 2022, he worked as a Full Professor at the Johannes Kepler University Linz before moving to Munich. His research focuses on the design of circuits and systems for both conventional and emerging technologies. For over 15 years, he has been actively advancing the field of quantum computing—establishing foundational software and design automation concepts. His contributions have earned numerous accolades, including Best Paper Awards, the DAC Under-40 Innovator Award, a Google Research Award, an ERC Consolidator Grant, and more. He collaborates with leading academic and industrial partners and plays a key role in initiatives such as the Munich Quantum Valley. He has published over 400 papers and serves on editorial boards and numerous boards of major journals and conferences. Through his roles in companies, he is also deeply engaged in technology transfer from research to practice.

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The development of computing machines found great success in the last decades. But the ongoing miniaturization of integrated circuits will reach its limits in the near future. Shrinking transistor sizes and power dissipation are the major barriers in the development of smaller and more powerful circuits.

Reversible logic provides an alternative that may overcome many of these problems in the future. For low-power design, reversible logic offers significant advantages since zero power dissipation will only be possible if computation is reversible. Furthermore, quantum computation profits from enhancements in this area, because every quantum circuit is inherently reversible and thus requires reversible descriptions. However, since reversible logic is subject to certain restrictions (e.g. fanout and feedback are not directly allowed), the design of reversible circuits significantly differs from the design of traditional circuits. Nearly all steps in the design flow (like synthesis, verification, or debugging) must be redeveloped so that they become applicable to reversible circuits as well. But research in reversible logic is still at the beginning. No continuous design flow exists so far.

In Towards a Design Flow for Reversible Logic, contributions to a design flow for reversible logic are presented. This includes advanced methods for synthesis, optimization, verification, and debugging. Formal methods like Boolean satisfiability and decision diagrams are thereby exploited. By combining the techniques proposed in the book, it is possible to synthesize reversible circuits representing large functions. Optimization approaches ensure that the resulting circuits are of small cost. Finally, a method for equivalence checking and automatic debugging allows to verify the obtained results and helps to accelerate the search for bugs in case of errors in the design. Combining the respective approaches, a first design flow for reversible circuits of significant size results.