The number of elements integrated within digital circuits grows exponentially, leading to enormous challenges in Computer Aided Design (CAD). Due to this exponential growth physical boundaries will be reached in the near future. Furthermore, power consumption of circuits becomes a major issue. To face these problems the research in the area of reversible logic and its applications in low-power design and quantum computing has become an intensely studied topic.

In the past many researchers have focused on synthesis of reversible logic (see publications) using the different gate libraries including (multiple control) Toffoli gates (MCT), (multiple control) Fredkin gates (MCF), Peres gates (P), and elementary quantum gates (EQ). Several synthesis methods - heuristic as well as exact ones - have been proposed and implemented.

However, most of these approaches are evaluated with limited sets of benchmarks. Due to page limitations many synthesis results are presented only by listing the respective costs but not the concrete circuit realization. This becomes a significant issue, since some authors use their own cost metrics, which makes it hard to decide which realization is better than others. Thus, a complementary comparison of different algorithms with respect to a large set of benchmarks is often not possible.

These issues are faced by RevLib, an online resource for reversible functions and reversible circuits. The motivation behind RevLib is to ease empirical studies in order to improve the evaluation of new approaches by providing an easy access to a large and complementary benchmark database. The benefits of widely used benchmark collections have already been seen e.g. in the circuit domain with ISCAS benchmarks, in the area of Boolean satisfiability by SATLIB and by TSPLIB for the traveling salesman problem.

RevLib provides a benchmark suite of different functions containing a variety of different types of problem instances. Since most of these functions can be embedded into reversible ones in different ways, several specifications (completely and incompletely specified) are given. Furthermore, for each specification at least one reversible circuit realization is given using different gate libraries. Thereby, reversible circuits obtained from exact approaches as well as heuristic approaches are provided. This allows to compare (new) algorithms with respect to the achieved quality.

To fill the database any researcher can submit function specifications and/or circuit realizations to RevLib. Since no widely accepted format for the specification of reversible functions and reversible circuits exists, a standardized file format is proposed. Additionally, several tools are provided supporting researchers in evaluating their approaches and documenting their results, i.e. a Benchmark Generator for creating random reversible functions with user-defined properties and Quiver for automatic visualization of reversible circuits given in the proposed format.