The Design of Sorters Based on DNA for Bio-Computers

Abstract

In the past few years, several articles have been devoted to the study of molec- ular computing based on DNA in order to implement algorithms for solving some NP-complete problems and simulate logic gates in silicon-based computers. A great deal of e®ort has been made on using DNA to implement simple logic gates, such as simple 1-bit comparators and simple adders, or to solve NP-complete problems, such as the Hamiltonian path problem, the travelling salesperson problem and the satis¯ability problem. All of the methods rely on the capability of DNA computing which could perform computation in huge parallelism to produce all possible solu- tions where the answer may be derived from. In this paper, we will ¯rst design a full bit-serial comparator that can perform the feedback operation. Then, we will de- sign a word-parallel bit-serial sorter which uses our comparators as the elementary building components. Our design of sorters can be applied to any sorting network, such as bitonic sorter and odd-even merge sorter.