The Design of Sorters Based on DNA for Bio-Computers

In the past few years, several articles have been devoted to the study of molecular computing based on DNA in order to implement algorithms for solving some NP-complete problems and simulate logic gates in silicon-based computers. A great deal of effort has been made on using DNA to implement simple logic gates, such as simple 1-bit comparators and simple adders, or to solve NP-complete problems, such as the Hamiltonian path problem, the travelling salesperson problem and the satisfiability problem. All of the methods rely on the capability of DNA computing which could perform computation in huge parallelism to produce all possible solutions where the answer may be derived from. In this paper, we will first design a full bit-serial comparator that can perform the feedback operation. Then, we will design a word-parallel bit-serial sorter which uses our comparators as the elementary building components. Our design of sorters can be applied to any sorting network, such as bitonic sorter and odd-even merge sorter.