Reversible Hardware for Acoustic Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel reversible hardware architecture for sound wave communication that enables energy-efficient time reversal of acoustic signals, allowing hardware reuse for transmission and reception.

Contribution

The paper presents a new reversible computation architecture specifically designed for acoustic wave time reversal, enhancing energy efficiency and hardware versatility.

Findings

Enables energy-efficient acoustic signal processing

Allows hardware reuse for transmission and reception

Demonstrates potential for low-power sound communication systems

Abstract

Reversible computation has been recognised as a potential solution to the technological bottleneck in the future of computing machinery. Rolf Landauer determined the lower limit for power dissipation in computation and noted that dissipation happens when information is lost, i.e., when a bit is erased. This meant that reversible computation, conserving information conserves energy as well, and as such can operate on arbitrarily small power. There were only a few applications and use cases of reversible computing hardware. Here we present a novel reversible computation architecture for time reversal of waves, with an application to sound wave communications. This energy efficient design is also a natural one, and it allows the use of the same hardware for transmission and reception at the time reversal mirror.