Reversible Fault-Tolerant Logic

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that the CMOS technology implementing irreversible logic will hit a scaling limit beyond 2016, and that the increased power dissipation is a major limiting factor. Reversible computing can potentially require arbitrarily small amounts of energy. Recently several nano-scale devices which have the potential to scale, and which naturally perform reversible logic, have emerged. This paper addresses several fundamental issues that need to be addressed before any nano-scale reversible computing systems can be realized, including reliability and performance trade-offs and architecture optimization. Many nano-scale devices will be limited to only near neighbor interactions, requiring careful optimization of circuits. We provide efficient fault-tolerant (FT) circuits when restricted to both 2D and 1D. Finally, we compute bounds on the entropy (and hence, heat) generated by our FT circuits and provide quantitative estimates on how large can we make our circuits before we lose any advantage over irreversible computing.