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International Symposium on Devices, Circuits and Systems (ISDCS)

Decision diagrams for the design of reversible and quantum circuits

Robert Wille, Philipp Niemann, Alwin Zulehner, Rolf Drechsler

Published Mar 1, 2018• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Reversible circuits found great interest in the past as an alternative computation paradigm which can be beneficial e.g. for encoder circuits, low power design, adiabatic circuits, verification, and much more. Besides that, reversible circuits provide the basis for many components of quantum circuits, which by themselves emerged as a very promising computing technology that, particularly these days, gains more and more relevance. All that led to a steadily increasing demand for methods that efficiently and correctly design such circuits. Decision diagrams play an important role in the design of conventional circuitry. In the meantime, also their benefits for the design of the newly emerging reversible and quantum circuits become evident. In this overview paper, we review and illustrate past work on decision diagrams for such circuits and sketch corresponding design methods relying on them. By this, we demonstrate how broadly decision diagrams can be employed in this area and what benefits they yield for these emerging technologies.

DOI
10.1109/isdcs.2018.8379626

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Reversible circuits found great interest in the past as an alternative computation paradigm which can be beneficial e.g. for encoder circuits, low power design, adiabatic circuits, verification, and much more. Besides that, reversible circuits provide the basis for many components of quantum circuits, which by themselves emerged as a very promising computing technology that, particularly these days, gains more and more relevance. All that led to a steadily increasing demand for methods that efficiently and correctly design such circuits. Decision diagrams play an important role in the design of conventional circuitry. In the meantime, also their benefits for the design of the newly emerging reversible and quantum circuits become evident. In this overview paper, we review and illustrate past work on decision diagrams for such circuits and sketch corresponding design methods relying on them. By this, we demonstrate how broadly decision diagrams can be employed in this area and what benefits they yield for these emerging technologies.
With quantum computers promising advantages even in the near-term NISQ era, there is a lively community that develops software and toolkits for the design of corresponding quantum circuits. Although the underlying problems are different, expertise from the design automation community, which developed sophisticated design solutions for the conventional realm in the past decades, can help here. In this respect, decision diagrams provide a promising foundation for tackling many design tasks such as simulation, synthesis, and verification of quantum circuits. However, users of the corresponding tools often do not have a proper background or an intuition about how these methods based on decision diagrams work and what their strengths and limits are. In this work, we first review the concepts of how decision diagrams can be employed, e.g., for the simulation and verification of quantum circuits. Afterwards, in an effort to make decision diagrams for quantum computing more accessible, we then present a visualization tool for quantum decision diagrams, which allows users to explore the behavior of decision diagrams in the design tasks mentioned above. Finally, we present decision diagram-based tools for simulation and verification of quantum circuits using the methods discussed above as part of the open-source Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT)—a set of tools for quantum computing developed at the Technical University of Munich and the Johannes Kepler University Linz and released under the MIT license. More information about the corresponding tools is available at https://github.com/cda-tum/ddsim . By this, we provide an introduction of the concepts and tools for potential users who would like to work with them as well as potential developers aiming to extend them.
After decades of continuous improvements and shrinking feature sizes, the development of conventional computing technologies faces enormous challenges. In particular, power dissipation in today's computer chips becomes crucial. Reversible computation is a promising alternative to these technologies, where power dissipation can be reduced or even eliminated. Furthermore, reversible logic builds the basis for quantum computation - a completely new way of processing which enables to solve certain problems exponentially faster compared to conventional methods. However, the design of reversible and quantum circuits is significantly different. Thus, new methods e.g. for synthesis, optimization, or verification are needed. This paper provides a brief introduction into reversible circuits and their respective design methods that have been proposed within the last years.
With the emergence of more and more applications for quantum computing, also the development of corresponding methods for design automation is receiving increasing interest. In this respect, decision diagrams provide a promising basis for many design tasks such as simulation, synthesis, verification, and more. However, users of the corresponding tools often do not have a proper background or an intuition about how these methods based on decision diagrams work and what their strengths and limits are. In an effort to make decision diagrams for quantum computing more accessible, we present a visualization tool which visualizes quantum decision diagrams and allows to explore their behavior when used in the design tasks mentioned above. The installation-free web-tool allows users to interactively learn how decision diagrams can be used in quantum computing, e.g., to (1) compactly represent quantum states and the functionality of quantum circuits, (2) to efficiently simulate quantum circuits, and (3) to verify the equivalence of two circuits. The tool is available at https://iic.jku.at/eda/research/quantum_dd/tool
Quantum computing has been attracting increasing attention in recent years because of the rapid advancements that have been made in quantum algorithms and quantum system design. Quantum algorithms are implemented with the help of quantum circuits. These circuits are inherently reversible in nature and often contain a sizeable Boolean part that needs to be synthesized. The logic design of such quantum circuits constitutes a non-trivial task and, hence, have heavily been investigated by researchers in the recent past. This paper provides a brief overview of these research. We review the major steps to be conducted in the logic design of quantum circuits and provide a sketch for each single step. These descriptions are enriched with discussions as well as references to the respective related work.
Reversible logic became a promising alternative to traditional circuits because of its applications in emerging technologies such as quantum computing, low-power design, DNA computing, or nanotechnologies. As a result, synthesis of the respective circuits is an intensely studied topic. However, most synthesis methods are limited, because they rely on a truth table representation of the function to be synthesized. In this paper, the authors present a synthesis approach that is based on Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs). The authors propose a technique to derive reversible or quantum circuits from BDDs by substituting all nodes of the BDD with a cascade of Toffoli or quantum gates, respectively. Boolean functions containing more than a hundred of variables can efficiently be synthesized. More precisely, a circuit can be obtained from a given BDD using an algorithm with linear worst case behavior regarding run-time and space requirements. Furthermore, using the proposed approach, theoretical results known from BDDs can be transferred to reversible circuits. Experiments show better results (with respect to the circuit cost) and a significantly better scalability in comparison to previous synthesis approaches.
This paper presents a decision diagram structure intended for the simulation and verification of reversible and quantum circuits. The structure is designed to efficiently represent the matrices describing reversible and quantum gate and circuit behaviour and takes advantage of key properties of those matrices. Algorithms are described for efficiently building the decision diagram representation directly from a gate without constructing the actual matrix and for performing matrix multiplication which is the fundamental operation to determine the function realized by a cascade of gates. Experimental results show the methods presented are applicable to large circuits at the state of the art in reversible and quantum synthesis and design.