Study of Architecture for Discrete Cosine Transform using Reversible Logic for IOT Application

Abstract

This paper presents a low-power, low-heat VLSI architecture for the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) tailored to resource-constrained IoT edge devices by exploiting reversible logic. The DCT is the workhorse of image and video compression—critical for IoT cameras, surveillance nodes, and sensor gateways where bandwidth and energy budget are limited. Conventional DCT implementations incur information loss in intermediate transformations and dissipate energy through irreversible switching; reversible computing offers a pathway to reduce energy dissipation by minimizing bit erasure and by enabling near-zero theoretical energy loss. We propose an optimized 8×1 (8-point) DCT datapath decomposed into butterfly stages implemented with a library of reversible gates (Peres, Toffoli, Fredkin) and complemented by efficient reversible adders and constant-multiplier modules. The architecture is designed to minimize three practical metrics important for reversible designs — quantum cost (mapped to gate complexity), garbage outputs, and constant/ancilla inputs — while preserving throughput suitable for low-frame-rate IoT streams. A hardware mapping strategy (structured pipeline + resource sharing) is described to trade off latency and area for the strict power envelope of IoT nodes. Simulation and synthesis (behavioral-level and gate-level) on representative CMOS technology nodes are used to validate functional correctness and to compare estimated switching activity with an equivalent irreversible design. Results indicate comparable area and timing with a significant theoretical reduction in information-loss-related energy dissipation and improved thermal profile, making the proposed reversible-DCT attractive for ultra-low-power IoT imaging applications. Practical considerations, limitations and directions for future physical implementation are discussed.