Progress in reversible processor design: A novel methodology for reversible carry look-ahead adder

Reversible logic is playing a significant role in quantum computing as quantum operations are unitary in nature. Quantum computer performs computation at an atomic level; thereby doing high performance computations beyond the limits of the conventional computing systems. Reversible arithmetic units such as adders, subtractors, multipliers form the essential component of a quantum computing system. Among the adder designs, carry look-ahead is widely used in high performance computing due to its O (log n) depth. In this work, we present improved designs of both in-place and out-of-place reversible carry look-ahead adder proposed in [1]. The proposed designs utilize the properties of the reversible Peres gate and the TR gate to optimize the logic depth, quantum cost and gate count compared to the existing designs proposed in [1]. Both the improved designs assume no input carry (C0=0). While the first approach makes use of ancilla bits to store the sum outputs, the second approach stores the sum outputs in one of the input locations. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.