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QiCells: A Modular RFSoC-based Approach to Interface Superconducting Quantum Bits

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Published:10 May 2023Publication History
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Abstract

Quantum computers will be a revolutionary extension of the heterogeneous computing world. They consist of many quantum bits (qubits) and require a careful design of the interface between the classical computer architecture and the quantum processor. For example, even single nanosecond variations of the interaction may have an influence on the quantum state. Designing a tailored interface electronics is therefore a major challenge, both in terms of signal integrity with respect to single channels, as well as the scaling of the signal count.

We developed such an interface electronics, an RFSoC-based qubit control system called QiController. In this article, we present the modular FPGA firmware design of our system. It features so-called digital unit cells, or QiCells. Each cell contains all the logic necessary to interact with a single superconducting qubit, including a custom-built RISC-V-based sequencer. Synchronization and data exchange between the cells is facilitated using a special star-point structure. Versatile routing and frequency-division multiplexing of generated signals between QiCells and converters are also supported. High-level programmability is provided using a custom Python-based description language and an associated compiler. We furthermore provide the resource utilization of our design and demonstrate its correct operation using an actual superconducting five-qubit chip.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems
        ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems  Volume 16, Issue 2
        June 2023
        451 pages
        ISSN:1936-7406
        EISSN:1936-7414
        DOI:10.1145/3587031
        • Editor:
        • Deming Chen
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 10 May 2023
        • Online AM: 26 December 2022
        • Accepted: 6 November 2022
        • Revised: 3 October 2022
        • Received: 4 May 2022
        Published in trets Volume 16, Issue 2

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