An Algorithm for Minimum Space Quantum Boolean Circuits Construction

Implementing a quantum computer at the circuit level has emerged as an important field of research recently. An important topic of building a general-purpose quantum computer is to implement classical Boolean logic using quantum gates and devices. Since the Toffoli gate is universal in classical Boolean logic, any classical combinational circuit can be implemented by the straightforward replacement algorithm with auxiliary qubits as intermediate storage. However, this inefficient implementation causes a large number of auxiliary qubits to be used. In this paper, a systematic procedure is proposed to derive a minimum space quantum circuit for a given classical combinational logic. We first formulate the problem of transforming an m-to-n bit classical Boolean logic into a t-bit unitary quantum operation. The eligible solution set is then constructed such that a solution can be found simply by selecting any member from this set. Finally, we show that the algorithm is optimal in terms of the space consumption.