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arXiv:2606.15113

Optimal Toffoli-Depth Multi-Controlled Toffoli Decomposition in 2D Qubit Layout

Anik Basu Bhaumik, Suman Dutta, Anupam Chattopadhyay

quant-phSubmitted Jun 13, 2026• Announced Jun 16, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

The multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gate is a key primitive in quantum arithmetic, oracle construction, and quantum cryptanalysis. Although recent work has established optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions under all-to-all qubit connectivity, their realization on near-term quantum hardware with restricted qubit connectivity remains largely unexplored. While general-purpose quantum mappers can route arbitrary circuits, they do not explicitly exploit the repeated interaction patterns inherent in MCT decompositions. In our present paper, we study architecture-aware mappings of optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions onto restricted two-dimensional qubit layouts. We begin with a structured geometric placements that preserve the parallelism of state-of-the-art Toffoli and MCT decompositions with no additional depth overhead. We further introduce a motif-based packing framework in which decomposition layers are represented by interaction motifs derived from basic Toffoli gates. By embedding these motifs vertex-disjointly into hardware graphs, we characterize the minimum-size topologies supporting the required qubit resources and derive explicit bounds on the resulting depth overhead under tight qubit budgets. Finally, we compare these bounds with routing-aware placement heuristics and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of embedding different motifs across a range of hardware topologies.

Comments
19 pages, 20 figures, 8 tables

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For realizing future fault-tolerant quantum computation, it is very important to reduce so-called the T-depth of a target quantum circuit. Thus, there have been many researches to consider how to decompose Multiple Controlled Toffoli (MCT) gates with few T-depth; these existing methods does not consider the T-depth of each qubit when they decompose one MCT gate. In contrast to existing methods, this paper proposes to consider the T-depth of each qubit when we decompose an MCT gate; we show that we can decrease the T-depth by considering Tdepth of each bit and appropriately selecting ancilla qubits and decomposition methods. In addition, to consider the impact of the decomposition of one MCT gate on the decomposition of subsequent gates, our method utilizes beam search to select a possibly best decomposition for each MCT gate. We confirmed that the proposed method can reduce the T-depth by an average of 17.1% compared to existing methods.

IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI•Jul 6, 2025•1 citation
The multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gate is a key primitive in quantum arithmetic, oracle construction, and quantum cryptanalysis. Although recent work has established optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions under all-to-all qubit connectivity, their realization on near-term quantum hardware with restricted qubit connectivity remains largely unexplored. While general-purpose quantum mappers can route arbitrary circuits, they do not explicitly exploit the repeated interaction patterns inherent in MCT decompositions.
In our present paper, we study architecture-aware mappings of optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions onto restricted two-dimensional qubit layouts. We begin with a structured geometric placements that preserve the parallelism of state-of-the-art Toffoli and MCT decompositions with no additional depth overhead. We further introduce a motif-based packing framework in which decomposition layers are represented by interaction motifs derived from basic Toffoli gates. By embedding these motifs vertex-disjointly into hardware graphs, we characterize the minimum-size topologies supporting the required qubit resources and derive explicit bounds on the resulting depth overhead under tight qubit budgets. Finally, we compare these bounds with routing-aware placement heuristics and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of embedding different motifs across a range of hardware topologies.
The multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gate is a fundamental primitive in quantum circuit design, with applications in quantum arithmetic, cryptanalysis, and algorithmic implementations. Being a high-level logical operation, the efficient decomposition of MCT gates into lower-level netlists has remained a major optimization challenge for decades. While emerging quantum error-correcting codes such as bivariate bicycle (BB) codes drastically reduce fault-tolerance overhead, realizing non-Clifford circuits on modular BB-code architectures introduces complex compilation bottlenecks governed by inter-module routing, factory density, and layout. Consequently, the mapping of MCT gates onto BB-code architectures remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we overcome these challenges by mapping optimal-Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions (Dutta et al., PRA, 2025) onto BB-code-based fault-tolerant architectures via direct ∣CCZ⟩\lvert \mathrm{CCZ} \rangle∣CCZ⟩ state injection from an external magic state factory. We introduce a targeted placement strategy that exploits the binary-tree structure of MCT decompositions to co-locate interacting subtrees. This approach reduces inter-module instruction counts by up to 16.02%\mathbf{16.02}\%16.02% compared to a naive sequential first-fit placement. We also evaluate the impact of factory placement across different topologies, demonstrating that grid-based layouts yield up to a 23.7%\mathbf{23.7}\%23.7% reduction in inter-module instructions relative to linear architectures (Yoder et al., arXiv, 2025). Finally, we validate the practical viability of our compiled circuits by analyzing aggregate execution errors and logical failure probabilities using the bicycle-ISA error estimator bicycle_numerics provided by the Qiskit community, https://github.com/qiskit-community/bicycle-architecture-compiler.
State-of-the-art studies on quantum layout synthesis have proposed various approaches based on the assumption that the input circuit is only composed of single-qubit and two-qubit gates. This assumption greatly simplifies the layout synthesis problem, and thus they only require ensuring that all controlled-NOT (CNOT) gates satisfy the hardware constraints imposed by a given coupling graph. However, during the design of quantum circuits, multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gates are usually used to better characterize the function of the circuits. Directly decomposing them into single and two-qubit gates with a fixed routine ignores the flexibility and optimization opportunity provided by various decomposition (i.e., logic synthesis) possibilities and thus suffers from sub-optimal results. This article proposes a co-optimization approach for quantum logic and layout synthesis. The MCT gates are first decomposed into Toffoli gates, and an efficient qubit mapping checking process is proposed to optimally solve the SWAP-free layout synthesis problem by automatically determining the decomposition result of each Toffoli gate. If a SWAP-free result cannot be found, the proposed algorithm flow is then used to obtain a solution that minimizes the total cost that simultaneously counts the cost caused by the different decomposition methods for Toffoli gates and the cost induced by SWAP gates. Compared with a state-of-the-art method, the proposed approach reduces the number of additional CNOT gates by 16% with around 25X runtime speedup for the cases with SWAP-free solutions, which cannot be obtained without the co-optimization approach.
The decomposition of complex quantum operations into experimentally feasible gate sets has been a central challenge since the early development of quantum computing. The multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gate is a key example, with applications across a wide range of quantum algorithms, whose decomposition into smaller gates, however, typically leads to deep circuits. In this work, we introduce a teleportation-based decomposition that implements an MCT gate. This decomposition has unit Toffoli depth, independent of the number of controls, while achieving the lowest Toffoli count among existing approaches for more than five controls at the cost of a linear overhead in ancilla qubits. We also investigate the parameter regimes in which the teleportation-based decomposition is preferable by analyzing the relative quality of distributed entanglement and Toffoli gates. We further demonstrate the advantages of this implementation in circuits that rely on MCT gates, such as the adder operator, quantum read-only memory, quantum neurons, and quantum decision trees.
In this paper, we consider the optimized implementation of Multi Controlled Toffoli (MCT) using the Clifford +++ T gate sets. While there are several recent works in this direction, here we explicitly quantify the trade-off (with concrete formulae) between the Toffoli depth (this means the depth using the classical 2-controlled Toffoli) of the nnn-controlled Toffoli (hereform we will tell nnn-MCT) and the number of clean ancilla qubits. Additionally, we achieve a reduced Toffoli depth (and consequently, T-depth), which is an extension of the technique introduced by Khattar et al. (2024). In terms of a negative result, we first show that using such conditionally clean ancilla techniques, Toffoli depth can never achieve exactly $\ceil{\log_2 n}$, though it remains of the same order. This highlights the limitation of the techniques exploiting conditionally clean ancilla [Nie et al., 2024, Khattar et al., 2024]. Then we prove that, in a more general setup, the T-Depth in the Clifford + T decomposition, via Toffoli gates, is lower bounded by $\ceil{\log_2 n}$, and this bound is achieved following the complete binary tree structure. Since the (222-controlled) Toffoli gate can further be decomposed using Clifford +++ T, various methodologies are explored too in this regard for trade-off related implications.
Efficient Synthesis of Multi-Controlled Toffoli Gates with Ternary Clifford+P9+P_9+P9​ Gates
Temporary occupation of qutrit levels can reduce the width and depth required for binary circuit logic in quantum computing. We introduce an efficient intermediate-qutrit decomposition of multi-controlled Toffoli gates with binary-subspace inputs and outputs. For balanced control widths n=2h−1n=2^h-1n=2h−1, the proposed decomposition is evaluated hierarchically through a tree, allowing independent subtree computations to proceed in parallel and reducing the depth from linear to logarithmic. The balanced low-depth construction requires 6n+36n+36n+3 logical P9P_9P9​ injections and n−34\frac{n-3}{4}4n−3​ clean ancillary qutrits. It matches the direct P9P_9P9​ count of a recursively extended Clifford+P9P_9P9​ baseline derived from the state-of-the-art work while using asymptotically one-quarter as many clean ancillas and replacing linear depth with logarithmic depth. For arbitrary control widths, a sequential extension preserves the 6n+36n+36n+3 P9P_9P9​ count but has depth O(log⁡m+n−m)O(\log m+n-m)O(logm+n−m) for a balanced core m=2h−1≤nm=2^h-1\leq nm=2h−1≤n, which is linear in the worst case over nnn. By reducing the resource overhead of a widely used reversible primitive, the proposed decomposition provides a practical building block for the design and compilation of more resource-efficient quantum algorithms in the fault-tolerant regime.
For realizing future fault-tolerant quantum computation, it is very important to reduce so-called the T-depth of a target quantum circuit. Thus, there have been many researches to consider how to decompose Multiple Controlled Toffoli (MCT) gates with few T-depth; these existing methods does not consider the T-depth of each qubit when they decompose one MCT gate. In contrast to existing methods, this paper proposes to consider the T-depth of each qubit when we decompose an MCT gate; we show that we can decrease the T-depth by considering Tdepth of each bit and appropriately selecting ancilla qubits and decomposition methods. In addition, to consider the impact of the decomposition of one MCT gate on the decomposition of subsequent gates, our method utilizes beam search to select a possibly best decomposition for each MCT gate. We confirmed that the proposed method can reduce the T-depth by an average of 17.1% compared to existing methods.