RevVis: Visualization of structures and properties in reversible circuits

The recent interest in reversible computation led to plenty of (automatic) approaches for the design of the corresponding circuits. While this automation is desired in order to provide a proper support for the design of complex functionality, often a manual consideration and human intuition enable improvements or provide new ideas for design solutions. However, this manual interaction requires a good understanding of the structure or the properties of a reversible cascade which, with increasing circuit size, becomes harder to grasp. Visualization techniques that abstract irrelevant details and focus on intuitively displaying important structures or properties provide a solution to this problem and have already successfully been applied in other domains such as design of conventional software, hardware debugging, or Boolean satisfiability. In this work, we introduce RevVis, a graphical interface which visualizes structures and properties of reversible circuits. RevVis collects relevant data of a given reversible cascade and presents it in a simple but intuitive fashion. By this, RevVis unveils information on characteristic structures and properties of reversible circuits that could be utilized for further optimization. A case study demonstrates this by considering circuits obtained from several synthesis approaches.