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arXiv:2605.01132

Low-cost Ultra-low Noise DAC System-on-Module for Scalable Ion-Trap Electrode Control

Mitchell G. Peaks, Mia M. Kaarls, Crystal Noel

quant-phphysics.ins-detSubmitted May 1, 2026• Announced May 5, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

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.

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10 Pages, 8 Figures, 1 Table

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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.
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.
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 advent of microfabricated ion traps for the quantum information community has allowed research groups to build traps that incorporate an unprecedented number of trapping zones. However, as device complexity has grown, the number of digital-to-analog converter (DAC) channels needed to control these devices has grown as well, with some of the largest trap assemblies now requiring nearly one hundred DAC channels. Providing electrical connections for these channels into a vacuum chamber can be bulky and difficult to scale beyond the current numbers of trap electrodes. This paper reports on the development and testing of an in-vacuum DAC system that uses only 9 vacuum feedthrough connections to control a 78-electrode microfabricated ion trap. The system is characterized by trapping single and multiple 40Ca ions. The measured axial mode stability, ion heating rates, and transport fidelities for a trapped ion are comparable to systems with external (air-side) National Instruments PXI-6733 DACs.
The advent of microfabricated ion traps for the quantum information community has allowed research groups to build traps that incorporate an unprecedented number of trapping zones. However, as device complexity has grown, the number of digital-to-analog converter (DAC) channels needed to control these devices has grown as well, with some of the largest trap assemblies now requiring nearly one hundred DAC channels. Providing electrical connections for these channels into a vacuum chamber can be bulky and difficult to scale beyond the current numbers of trap electrodes. This paper reports on the development and testing of an in-vacuum DAC system that uses only 9 vacuum feedthrough connections to control a 78-electrode microfabricated ion trap. The system is characterized by trapping single and multiple (40)Ca(+) ions. The measured axial mode stability, ion heating rates, and transport fidelities for a trapped ion are comparable to systems with external (air-side) commercial DACs.
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.
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.