A Scalable Reversible Computer in Silicon

摘要

The reversible and "adiabatic" transfer of charge in digital circuits has recently been a subject of interest in the low-power electronics community, but until now, no one had created a complete, fully reversible CPU using this technology. Fundamental physical scaling laws imply that a fully reversible processing element would permit unboundedly greater efficiency at some tasks, by several different metrics, than can be achieved with any possible irreversible computer. This paper describes the design of Flattop, a fully-adiabatic chip now in fabrication, which can serve as a general-purpose parallel processor when tiled in large arrays. Flattop implements the Billiard Ball Cellular Automaton, a universal and reversible model of computation.