Babu and Chowdhury [H.M.H. Babu, A.R. Chowdhury, Design of a compact reversible binary coded decimal adder circuit, Journal of Systems Architecture 52 (5) (2006) 272-282] recently proposed, in this journal, a reversible adder for binary-coded decimals. This paper corrects and optimizes their design. The optimized 1-decimal BCD full-adder, a 13 × 13 reversible logic circuit, is faster, and has lower circuit cost and less garbage bits. It can be used to build a fast reversible m-decimal BCD full-adder that has a delay of only m + 17 low-power reversible CMOS gates. For a 32-decimal (128-bit) BCD addition, the circuit delay of 49 gates is significantly lower than is the number of bits used for the BCD representation. A complete set of reversible half- and full-adders for n-bit binary numbers and m-decimal BCD numbers is presented. The results show that special-purpose design pays off in reversible logic design by drastically reducing the number of garbage bits. Specialized designs benefit from support by reversible logic synthesis. All circuit components required for optimizing the original design could also be synthesized successfully by an implementation of an existing synthesis algorithm.

Keywords: Reversible logic circuit; Full-adder; Half-adder; Parallel adder; Binary-coded decimal; Application of reversible logic synthesis