Microarchitectures for Heterogeneous Superconducting Quantum Computers

  1. Samuel Stein,
  2. Sara Sussman,
  3. Teague Tomesh,
  4. Charles Guinn,
  5. Esin Tureci,
  6. Sophia Fuhui Lin,
  7. Wei Tang,
  8. James Ang,
  9. Srivatsan Chakram,
  10. Ang Li,
  11. Margaret Martonosi,
  12. Fred T. Chong,
  13. Andrew A. Houck,
  14. Isaac L. Chuang,
  15. and Michael Austin DeMarco
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computing (NISQ) has dominated headlines in recent years, with the longer-term vision of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation (FTQC) offering significant
potential albeit at currently intractable resource costs and quantum error correction (QEC) overheads. For problems of interest, FTQC will require millions of physical qubits with long coherence times, high-fidelity gates, and compact sizes to surpass classical systems. Just as heterogeneous specialization has offered scaling benefits in classical computing, it is likewise gaining interest in FTQC. However, systematic use of heterogeneity in either hardware or software elements of FTQC systems remains a serious challenge due to the vast design space and variable physical constraints. This paper meets the challenge of making heterogeneous FTQC design practical by introducing HetArch, a toolbox for designing heterogeneous quantum systems, and using it to explore heterogeneous design scenarios. Using a hierarchical approach, we successively break quantum algorithms into smaller operations (akin to classical application kernels), thus greatly simplifying the design space and resulting tradeoffs. Specializing to superconducting systems, we then design optimized heterogeneous hardware composed of varied superconducting devices, abstracting physical constraints into design rules that enable devices to be assembled into standard cells optimized for specific operations. Finally, we provide a heterogeneous design space exploration framework which reduces the simulation burden by a factor of 10^4 or more and allows us to characterize optimal design points. We use these techniques to design superconducting quantum modules for entanglement distillation, error correction, and code teleportation, reducing error rates by 2.6x, 10.7x, and 3.0x compared to homogeneous systems.

Systematic Crosstalk Mitigation for Superconducting Qubits via Frequency-Aware Compilation

  1. Yongshan Ding,
  2. Pranav Gokhale,
  3. Sophia Fuhui Lin,
  4. Richard Rines,
  5. Thomas Propson,
  6. and Frederic T. Chong
One of the key challenges in current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers is to control a quantum system with high-fidelity quantum gates. There are many reasons a quantum
gate can go wrong — for superconducting transmon qubits in particular, one major source of gate error is the unwanted crosstalk between neighboring qubits due to a phenomenon called frequency crowding. We motivate a systematic approach for understanding and mitigating the crosstalk noise when executing near-term quantum programs on superconducting NISQ computers. We present a general software solution to alleviate frequency crowding by systematically tuning qubit frequencies according to input programs, trading parallelism for higher gate fidelity when necessary. The net result is that our work dramatically improves the crosstalk resilience of tunable-qubit, fixed-coupler hardware, matching or surpassing other more complex architectural designs such as tunable-coupler systems. On NISQ benchmarks, we improve worst-case program success rate by 13.3x on average, compared to existing traditional serialization strategies.