A novel fault tolerant reversible gate for nanotechnology based systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel reversible logic gate, NFT. It is a parity preserving reversible logic gate, that is, the parity of the outputs matches that of the inputs. We demonstrate that the NFT gate can implement all Boolean functions. It renders a wide class of circuit faults readily detectable at the circuit's outputs. The proposed parity preserving reversible gate, allows any fault that affects no more than a single signal to be detectable at the circuit's primary outputs. The NFT gate can be used to make fault tolerant reversible logic circuits. We demonstrate how the well-known, and very useful, Toffoli gate can be synthesized from only two parity-preserving reversible gates. We show that our proposed parity-preserving Toffoli gate is much better in terms of number of reversible gates, number of garbage outputs and hardware complexity with compared to the existing counterpart. © 2008 Science Publications.