Design Automation for Adiabatic Circuits

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated design methodology for adiabatic circuits, enabling energy-efficient computations by explicitly considering their reversible and switching rules, with demonstrated benefits and applicability.

Contribution

It introduces a dedicated automated design scheme for adiabatic circuits that incorporates recent theoretical insights, improving efficiency over previous approaches.

Findings

Automated methods successfully realize adiabatic functions.

Design automation improves efficiency and applicability.

Evaluations confirm the benefits of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Adiabatic circuits are heavily investigated since they allow for computations with an asymptotically close to zero energy dissipation per operation - serving as an alternative technology for many scenarios where energy efficiency is preferred over fast execution. Their concepts are motivated by the fact that the information lost from conventional circuits results in an entropy increase which causes energy dissipation. To overcome this issue, computations are performed in a (conditionally) reversible fashion which, additionally, have to satisfy switching rules that are different from conventional circuitry - crying out for dedicated design automation solutions. While previous approaches either focus on their electrical realization (resulting in small, hand-crafted circuits only) or on designing fully reversible building blocks (an unnecessary overhead), this work aims for providing an automatic and dedicated design scheme that explicitly takes the recent findings in this domain into account. To this end, we review the theoretical and technical background of adiabatic circuits and present automated methods that dedicatedly realize the desired function as an adiabatic circuit. The resulting methods are further optimized - leading to an automatic and efficient design automation for this promising technology. Evaluations confirm the benefits and applicability of the proposed solution.