The error rates of quantum devices are orders of magnitude higher than what is needed to run most quantum applications. To close this gap, Quantum Error Correction (QEC) encodes logical qubits and distributes information using several physical qubits. By periodically executing a syndrome extraction circuit on the logical qubits, information about errors (called syndrome) is extracted while running programs. A decoder uses these syndromes to identify and correct errors in real time, which is required to use feedback implemented in quantum algorithms. Unfortunately, software decoders are slow and hardware decoders are fast but less accurate. Thus, almost all QEC studies so far have relied on offline decoding. To enable real-time decoding in near-term QEC, we propose LILLIPUT-- a Lightweight Low Latency Look-Up Table decoder. LILLIPUT consists of two parts-- First, it translates syndromes into error detection events that index into a Look-Up Table (LUT) whose entry provides the error information in real-time. Second, it programs the LUTs with error assignments for all possible error events by running a software decoder offline. LILLIPUT tolerates an error on any operation in the quantum hardware, including gates and measurement, and the number of tolerated errors grows with the size of the code. It needs <7% logic on off-the-shelf FPGAs that allows it to be easily integrated alongside the control and readout circuits in existing systems. LILLIPUT incurs a latency of few nanoseconds and enables real-time decoding. We also propose Compressed LUTs (CLUTs) to reduce the memory needed by LILLIPUT. By exploiting the fact that not all error events are equally likely and only storing data for the most probable error events, CLUTs reduce the memory needed by up-to 107x (from 148 MB to 1.38 MB) without degrading accuracy.
The error rates of quantum devices are orders of magnitude higher than what is needed to run most quantum applications. To close this gap, Quantum Error Correction (QEC) encodes logical qubits and distributes information using several physical qubits. By periodically executing a syndrome extraction circuit on the logical qubits, information about errors (called syndrome) is extracted while running programs. A decoder uses these syndromes to identify and correct errors in real time, which is required to use feedback implemented in quantum algorithms. Unfortunately, software decoders are slow and hardware decoders are fast but less accurate. Thus, almost all QEC studies so far have relied on offline decoding. To enable real-time decoding in near-term QEC, we propose LILLIPUT-- a Lightweight Low Latency Look-Up Table decoder. LILLIPUT consists of two parts-- First, it translates syndromes into error detection events that index into a Look-Up Table (LUT) whose entry provides the error information in real-time. Second, it programs the LUTs with error assignments for all possible error events by running a software decoder offline. LILLIPUT tolerates an error on any operation in the quantum hardware, including gates and measurement, and the number of tolerated errors grows with the size of the code. It needs <7% logic on off-the-shelf FPGAs that allows it to be easily integrated alongside the control and readout circuits in existing systems. LILLIPUT incurs a latency of few nanoseconds and enables real-time decoding. We also propose Compressed LUTs (CLUTs) to reduce the memory needed by LILLIPUT. By exploiting the fact that not all error events are equally likely and only storing data for the most probable error events, CLUTs reduce the memory needed by up-to 107x (from 148 MB to 1.38 MB) without degrading accuracy.
The error rates of quantum devices are orders of magnitude higher than what is needed to run most quantum applications. To close this gap, Quantum Error Correction (QEC) encodes logical qubits and distributes information using several physical qubits. By periodically executing a syndrome extraction circuit on the logical qubits, information about errors (called syndrome) is extracted while running programs. A decoder uses these syndromes to identify and correct errors in real time, which is necessary to prevent accumulation of errors. Unfortunately, software decoders are slow and hardware decoders are fast but less accurate. Thus, almost all QEC studies so far have relied on offline decoding.
Quantum computers can solve selected problems more efficiently than classical computers, but current devices are limited by high physical error rates. Quantum Error Correction (QEC) mitigates this by encoding many physical qubits into a logical qubit, with the surface code among the most widely studied approaches. Since syndrome measurements are produced continuously, the decoder must process them fast enough to avoid becoming a system bottleneck, making real-time decoding essential for fault-tolerant quantum computing. While most state-of-the-art real-time decoders rely on Minimum-Weight Perfect Matching (MWPM), we instead use a high-accuracy Graph Neural Network (GNN) that trades higher computational cost for lower logical error rates. To make this GNN practical for real-time decoding, we apply algorithm-hardware co-design. We reduce complexity through hardware-guided pruning and retraining, producing two hardware-friendly models that reduce parameter count by 3.1× and 6.5×. These target, respectively, an average decoding latency of one syndrome cycle and a worst-case latency within one syndrome cycle. We further reduce hardware cost using input-graph filtering and post-training quantization. Based on these optimized models, we propose an FPGA-based architecture for low-latency inference and real-time decoding. Evaluated on surface codes up to distance 7 under circuit-level noise at physical error rate p=10−3, our decoder outperforms MWPM in decoding accuracy for both average-latency and max-latency settings. It reduces logical error rate by 40% at 1μs average latency, and by 13% under a strict 1μs deadline.
Quantum devices suffer from high error rates, which makes them ineffective for running practical applications. Quantum computers can be made fault tolerant using Quantum Error Correction (QEC), which protects quantum information by encoding logical qubits using data qubits and parity qubits. The data qubits collectively store the quantum information and the parity qubits are measured periodically to produce a syndrome, which is decoded by a classical decoder to identify the location and type of errors. To prevent errors from accumulating and causing a logical error, decoders must accurately identify errors in real-time, necessitating the use of hardware solutions because software decoders are slow. Ideally, a real-time decoder must match the performance of the Minimum-Weight Perfect Matching (MWPM) decoder. However, due to the complexity of the underlying Blossom algorithm, state-of-the-art real-time decoders either use lookup tables, which are not scalable, or use approximate decoding, which significantly increases logical error rates.
Quantum error correction (QEC) is essential for realizing large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computation, yet its practical implementation remains a major engineering challenge. In particular, QEC demands precise real-time control of a large number of qubits and low-latency, high-throughput and accurate decoding of error syndromes. While most prior work has focused primarily on decoder design, the overall performance of any QEC system depends critically on all its subsystems including control, communication, and decoding, as well as their integration.
To address this challenge, we present an open-source, fully integrated QEC system built on RISC-Q, a generator for RISC-V-based quantum control architectures. Implemented on RFSoC FPGAs, our system prototype integrates real-time qubit control, a scalable distributed multi-board architecture, and the state-of-the-art hardware QEC decoder within a low-latency, high-throughput decoding pipeline, forming a complete hardware platform ready for deployment with superconducting qubits.
Experimental evaluation on a three-board prototype based on AMD ZCU216 RFSoCs demonstrates an end-to-end QEC decoding-feedback latency of 446 ns for a distance-3 surface code, including syndrome aggregation, network communication, syndrome decoding, and error distribution. Extrapolating from measured subsystem performance and state-of-the-art decoder benchmarks, the architecture can achieve sub-microsecond decoding-feedback latency up to a distance-21 surface code ($\sim$881 physical qubits) when scaled to larger hardware configurations.
Reliable large-scale quantum computation relies on fault-tolerant architectures, where quantum error correction (QEC) continuously extracts and decodes error syndromes in real time. A critical component in QEC is the decoder, a classical subsystem that must simultaneously deliver high logical accuracy and ultra-low latency. This paper presents a novel algorithm-hardware co-design that improves the accuracy-latency trade-off over existing approaches such as vanilla Minimum-Weight Perfect Matching (MWPM) and Union-Find (UF) decoders. At the algorithmic level, we introduce coset ensemble decoding, which improves UF decoding by explicitly exploiting logically equivalent cosets. Our method performs ensemble forest exploration to generate multiple coset-consistent candidates and aggregates them to approximate coset-level maximum-likelihood decoding. We further reduce computational and memory complexity via reverse-order elimination and lossless graph compression, without sacrificing accuracy. At the hardware level, we design a domain-specific architecture that temporally reuses resources, avoiding the code-distance-proportional resource growth in prior spatial architectures. Several optimizations, such as multi-bank memory hashing and hierarchical ID mapping, are proposed to mitigate pipeline stalls and memory conflicts under highly concurrent access patterns. Under a circuit-level depolarizing noise model, our co-design approach achieves a better accuracy-latency trade-off than prior MWPM- and UF-based decoders, while reducing FPGA LUT consumption by up to 8.2 times compared with reported UF-based decoder resources. The tunable candidate number further exposes a flexible design knob, enabling users to tailor decoding performance to the requirements of different fault-tolerant workloads. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/IMSeonL/coset-ensemble-decoder.
Noise-induced errors in quantum information processing corrupt computation and cause useful algorithms to fail. Quantum ErrorCorrection (QEC) counteracts this by encoding a single logical qubit across many physical qubits and correcting errors through repeatedsyndrome measurements. The Minimum-Weight Perfect Matching (MWPM) decoder is the accuracy benchmark for surface-codedecoding, but its microsecond-scale latency can consume the entire QEC cycle time of superconducting processors, leaving almost nomargin for other control operations. Pre-decoded lookup tables reduce latency to the nanosecond scale, but their memory requirementsgrow exponentially with code size, limiting them to very small code distances. In this work, we demonstrate a single-level cache,implemented as a software prototype, that accelerates decoding by exploiting the repetitive nature of surface-code syndromes. Hitrates above 80% are achieved for code distances up to 9 at below-threshold noise rates, and effective decoding speedups of up to18.1 times over PyMatching’s standalone decoding time are observed at code distance ≥ 5. Cache lookup latency remains below 400nanoseconds in the worst case, with memory well below that of full lookup tables. We further develop a mathematical frameworkdefining the theoretical limits of any cache-based decoder.