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International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming

ICALP 1980: Automata, Languages and Programming pp 632–644Cite as

Reversible computing

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 85))

Abstract

The theory of reversible computing is based on invertible primitives and composition rules that preserve invertibility. With these constraints, one can still satisfactorily deal with both functional and structural aspects of computing processes; at the same time, one attains a closer correspondence between the behavior of abstract computing systems and the microscopic physical laws (which are presumed to be strictly reversible) that underly any concrete implementation of such systems.

According to a physical interpretation, the central result of this paper is that it is ideally possible to build sequential circuits with zero internal power dissipation.

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List of references

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, 545 Technology Sq., 02139, Cambridge, MA

    Tommaso Toffoli

Authors
  1. Tommaso Toffoli
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Jaco de Bakker Jan van Leeuwen

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© 1980 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Toffoli, T. (1980). Reversible computing. In: de Bakker, J., van Leeuwen, J. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 1980. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 85. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-10003-2_104

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-10003-2_104

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-10003-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39346-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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