A Modular Approach to Designing an Online Testable Ternary Reversible Circuit

Energy inefficiency in irreversible logic circuits is creating an obstruction on the path towards continued advancements in complexity and reductions in the size of today’s computer systems. Designing the component circuits in a reversible manner may offer a possible solution to this crisis, allowing significant reductions in power consumption and heat dissipation requirements. Multi-valued (MV) reversible logic can provide further advantages over binary reversible logic, such as better performance or reducing wiring congestion. The current literature, however, contains very little work on testability of such designs. This paper describes the design of an online testable block for ternary reversible logic. This block implements most ternary logic operations and provides online testability for a reversible ternary network composed of several of these blocks. The testable block is composed of reversible building blocks, and thus is itself reversible. Multiple such blocks can be combined to construct complex and complete, testable, ternary reversible circuits.