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arXiv:2508.04093 · Applied Physics Letters

Trapping an atomic ion using time-division multiplexed digital-to-analog converters

Ryutaro Ohira, Masanari Miyamoto, Shinichi Morisaka, Ippei Nakamura, Atsushi Noguchi, U. Tanaka, Takefumi Miyoshi

Published Dec 8, 2025• 1 citation
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Abstract

Independent control of numerous electrodes in quantum charge-coupled device architectures presents a significant challenge for wiring and hardware scalability. To address this issue, we demonstrate a voltage control method based on time-division multiplexing (TDM). This approach utilizes a single high-update-rate digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to sequentially generate control signals for multiple electrodes, thereby reducing both the number of required DACs and associated wiring. We experimentally validate this concept by developing a 10-channel system that operates with only two DACs. The developed TDM-based voltage control system is applied to a surface electrode trap, where we successfully trap a single 40Ca+ ion and demonstrate a simple ion transport primitive. This approach offers a resource-efficient and scalable solution for advanced quantum computing systems based on trapped ions.

DOI
10.1063/5.0294871

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Independent control of numerous electrodes in quantum charge-coupled device architectures presents a significant challenge for wiring and hardware scalability. To address this issue, we demonstrate a voltage control method based on time-division multiplexing (TDM). This approach utilizes a single high-update-rate digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to sequentially generate control signals for multiple electrodes, thereby reducing both the number of required DACs and associated wiring. We experimentally validate this concept by developing a 10-channel system that operates with only two DACs. The developed TDM-based voltage control system is applied to a surface electrode trap, where we successfully trap a single 40Ca+ ion and demonstrate a simple ion transport primitive. This approach offers a resource-efficient and scalable solution for advanced quantum computing systems based on trapped ions.
The scaling up of trapped-ion quantum processors based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture is difficult owing to the extensive electronics and high-density wiring required to control numerous trap electrodes. In conventional QCCD architectures, each trap electrode is controlled via a dedicated digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The conventional approach places an overwhelming demand on electronic resources and wiring complexity. This is because the number of trap electrodes typically exceeds the number of trapped-ion qubits. This study proposes a method that leverages a high-speed DAC to generate time-division multiplexed signals to control a large-scale QCCD trapped-ion quantum processor. The proposed method replaces conventional DACs with a single high-speed DAC that generates the complete voltage waveforms required to control the trap electrodes, thereby significantly reducing the wiring complexity and overall resource requirements. Based on realistic parameters and commercially available electronics, our analysis demonstrates that a QCCD trapped-ion quantum computer with10,000\mathbf{1 0, 0 0 0}10,000trap electrodes can be controlled using only 13 field-programmable gate arrays and 104 high-speed DACs. This is in stark contrast to the10,000\mathbf{1 0, 0 0 0}10,000dedicated DACs required by conventional control methods. Consequently, employing this approach, we developed a proof-of-concept electronic system and evaluated its analog output performance.
Trapped-ion quantum computers based on the quantum charge-coupled device architecture require on the order of ten trap electrodes per qubit, making the number of vacuum feedthroughs a bottleneck at the system scale. Time-division multiplexed (TDM)-based voltage control for trap electrodes provides a natural route to alleviate this constraint. However, previous studies have been limited to architectural proposals for static trap-potential compensation and room-temperature demonstrations of dynamic-electrode control, leaving cryogenic operation of TDM-based voltage control for static and dynamic electrodes experimentally unexplored. In this study, we develop and cryogenically validate TDM-based voltage control schemes for two distinct electrode classes. For static electrodes used in trap-potential compensation, we implement a 32-channel demultiplexed system operating at approximately 27~K, achieving an effective voltage update rate of 37.5~kHz with an output range of ±10 V\pm10~\mathrm{V}±10 V per channel. For dynamic electrodes used in ion operations, such as shuttling, we implement a four-channel demultiplexed system operating at approximately 14~K, achieving an effective voltage update rate of 1~MHz with a comparable output range. These results establish TDM-based voltage control as a practical approach for both electrode classes, providing a path for mitigating the vacuum feedthrough bottleneck in scalable trapped-ion quantum processors.
A fault-tolerant quantum computer is expected to require thousands of qubits. Trapped ion architectures provide a modular approach where the quantum register is divided into multiple subregisters connected by physically moving the corresponding ions. Transporting ions at scale comes with several challenges such as the need to connect thousands of control lines to an ion trap chip. Multiplexing the required control voltages from few input signals to multiple electrodes offers a solution to this wiring challenge. Here we demonstrate a quantum processing unit that combines a surface ion trap with a time multiplexer via a sample-and-hold technique that initially charges electrodes to fixed voltages and disconnects them during qubit operations. We characterize the unit's performance by measuring motional heating rates below one phonon per second in both open and closed switch configurations. We further characterize the sample and hold process and find that sampling intervals below 50 ms are sufficient to keep expected gate errors from decaying charges during the hold phase below 10−410^{-4}10−4. Our results indicate that the multiplexing scheme is compatible with high-fidelity operations.
The quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) is one of the notable architectures to achieve large-scale trapped-ion quantum computers. To realize QCCD architecture, ions must be transported quickly while minimizing motional excitation. High-voltage sources are necessary to achieve such high-quality ion transport through a high secular frequency. In this study, we report the development of a field programmable gate array-based digital-to-analog converter (DAC) system with an output voltage range of ±50 V and demonstrate its effectiveness in ion transport operations. The device provides a 16-channel analog output, a maximum update rate of 16 mega updates per second, a slew rate of 20 V/μs, and a bandwidth of >200 kHz. By optimizing the voltage sets with quadratic programming, we experimentally confirmed that this DAC system can achieve more than twice the secular frequency attainable when its output range is restricted to ±10 V, which is consistent with the fact that scaling all electrode voltages by a factor of 5 will scale the secular frequency by 5. Since the output range of many commercially available DACs is commonly limited to ±10 V, this increase is effective for ion-shuttling operations, such as transport, split, and merge. The developed DAC system has the potential to increase the speed of ion transport thereby reducing processing times in QCCD-based quantum computers.
Trapped-ion Quantum Charge-Coupled Devices (QCCD) are a leading contender for quantum computing, but their scalability is constrained by control wiring and electronics. Wiring using Integrated Switching Electronics (WISE), a recently proposed QCCD architecture, reduces wiring through multiplexing and integrated switching hardware. However, this leaves an execution model with limited parallelism and limited flexibility in ion movement. Further, these devices need to be paired with a quantum error correction (QEC) code to enable fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC). Can WISE architectures efficiently support FTQC requirements? Which QEC choices, device and control parameters are practical? We present WISER, a cross-layer design-space exploration framework for trapped-ion systems with multiplexed control. WISER combines a WISE-specific SAT-based compiler, a physics-informed noise model and logical-memory simulation to estimate logical error rates, logical clock speeds and control power across hardware parameters and QEC families. Its compiler reduces routing time by 2.62.62.6--18.8×18.8\times18.8× relative to a greedy WISE-compatible baseline. Our analysis provides concrete design guidance. Two-ion traps with 161616-way multiplexing, 8×8\times8× lower than the original WISE proposal, give the fastest logical clock that meets our reliability and cold-stage power targets. With current hardware parameters, the distance-7 surface code is the only evaluated code to meet our early-FTQC screen, at 4.58 4.58\,4.58Hz and 2.04 2.04\,2.04W of DAC power per logical qubit. At this operating point, ion transport and recooling take 949494--96%96\%96% of the WISE cycle, and even without them sample-and-hold electrode charging leaves millisecond-scale syndrome-extraction rounds.
A new design for an open-hardware Digital-to-Analog Converter System-on-Module is presented for low-noise ion-trap electrode control. The design specifications were established to fill the technical needs of a modular, scalable DC electrode control platform with sufficient bandwidth, noise characteristics and control flexibility. Critically, a priority was placed on supply-chain management considerations and cost effectiveness for scaling. The system is based upon the Texas Instruments DAC81416 and AMD Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA for the analog signal and compute architecture respectively. Performance characterization of a prototype device suggests the design is suitable for a variety of ion-trap physics experiments and quantum computing applications.