An Algorithm for Reversible Logic Circuit Synthesis Based on Tensor Decomposition

An algorithm for reversible logic synthesis is proposed. The task is, for given $n$-bit substitution map $P_n: \{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^n$, to find a sequence of reversible logic gates that implements the map. The gate library adopted in this work consists of multiple-controlled Toffoli gates denoted by $C^m\!X$, where $m$ is the number of control bits that ranges from 0 to $n-1$. Controlled gates with large $m \,\,(>2)$ are then further decomposed into $C^0\!X$, $C^1\!X$, and $C^2\!X$ gates. A primary concern in designing the algorithm is to reduce the use of $C^2\!X$ gate (also known as Toffoli gate) which is known to be universal. The main idea is to view an $n$-bit substitution map as a rank-$2n$ tensor and to transform it such that the resulting map can be written as a tensor product of a rank-($2n-2$) tensor and the $2\times 2$ identity matrix. Let $\mathcal{P}_n$ be a set of all $n$-bit substitution maps. What we try to find is a size reduction map $\mathcal{A}_{\rm red}: \mathcal{P}_n \rightarrow \{P_n: P_n = P_{n-1} \otimes I_2\}$. One can see that the output $P_{n-1} \otimes I_2$ acts nontrivially on $n-1$ bits only, meaning that the map to be synthesized becomes $P_{n-1}$. The size reduction process is iteratively applied until it reaches tensor product of only $2 \times 2$ matrices.