UC Berkeley

Quantum computers will potentially be able to solve certain classes of

problems more efficiently than possible on a classical computer. Due

to the fragility of quantum data, a large scale quantum computer will

require a robust system to enable reliable communication within the

datapath. We present a scalable architecture for a quantum computer

which specifically addresses communication concerns. Our design

minimizes communication error by using a specialized interconnection

network to perform long-distance movement.

We developed a set of tools to construct and study quantum datapath

designs based on ion trap quantum technology. Our tools automatically

synthesize and insert the interconnection network used for

long-distance communication into the target datapath. We present a

set of greedy heuristics to optimize the routing and scheduling of

communication within this network and show that our approach performs

as well as an optimal case determined using integer linear

programming. We study a number of different quantum circuits

including randomly generated circuits, quantum adder circuits, and

ultimately Shor's factorization algorithm and show that designs using

our optimizations significantly improve upon prior work in terms of a

probabilistic area delay metric.