Quantum Micro-architecture
In the Quantum architecture theme, the definition and implementation of a quantum computer architecture to enable creating a new computational device - a quantum computer as an accelerator is researched. The idea of a quantum accelerator contains the full stack of the layers of an accelerator. Such a stack starts at the highest level describing the target application of the accelerator. The next layer abstracts the quantum logic outlining the algorithm that is to be executed on the quantum accelerator. In our case, the logic is expressed in the universal quantum-classical hybrid computation language developed in the group, called OpenQL, which visualised the quantum processor as a computational accelerator. The OpenQL compiler translates the program to a common assembly language, called cQASM, which can be executed on a quantum simulator. The cQASM represents the instruction set that can be executed by the micro-architecture implemented in the quantum accelerator. In a subsequent step, the compiler can convert the cQASM to generate the eQASM, which is executable on a particular experimental device incorporating the platform-specific parameters. This way, we are able to distinguish clearly the experimental research towards better qubits, and the industrial and societal applications that need to be developed and executed on a quantum device. The first case offers experimental physicists with a full-stack experimental platform using realistic qubits with decoherence and error-rates while the second case offers perfect qubits to the quantum application developer, where there is no decoherence nor error-rates.
Publications:
- Quantum Computer Architecture: Towards Full-Stack Quantum Accelerators
- A control microarchitecture for fault-tolerant quantum computing
- Quantum Accelerated Computer Architectures
- A Microarchitecture for a Superconducting Quantum Processor
- Towards a scalable quantum computer
- An experimental microarchitecture for a superconducting quantum processor
- The engineering challenges in quantum computing
- A heterogeneous quantum computer architecture
- Quantum computing: How far away is it?
- eQASM: An Executable Quantum Instruction Set Architecture