Quantum computing is transitioning from an academic idea to a practical technology, driven by recent hardware advancements and clear paths toward real-world applications. Universal quantum ecosystems (e.g., Qiskit, Cirq, PennyLane) facilitate this transition by providing a consistent interface to diverse quantum devices, abstracting hardware-specific details through a device model that captures each device's computational capabilities. However, these device models have historically been shaped by superconducting hardware, assuming static qubit positions and fixed coupling maps. This prevents them from representing the unique computational capabilities of emerging technologies such as neutral atoms, which feature dynamic qubit rearrangement and zoned operations. As a result, although numerous specialized compilers for neutral atom devices already exist, they cannot retrieve the hardware information they need through these ecosystems - creating a technology lock that hinders or even prevents the integration of neutral atom devices. In this work, we demonstrate how this limitation leads to suboptimal compilation results and can exclude certain devices entirely. Motivated by this, we propose rethinking current device models to faithfully represent neutral atom devices, enabling their seamless integration into universal quantum ecosystems. Evaluations conducted within the Quantum Device Management Interface (QDMI) demonstrate that the proposed device model unlocks a routing overhead fidelity improvement by a factor of up to 100,000 on a circuit with 16 qubits and 600 gates.
Quantum computing is transitioning from an academic idea to a practical technology, driven by recent hardware advancements and clear paths toward real-world applications. Universal quantum ecosystems (e.g., Qiskit, Cirq, PennyLane) facilitate this transition by providing a consistent interface to diverse quantum devices, abstracting hardware-specific details through a device model that captures each device's computational capabilities. However, these device models have historically been shaped by superconducting hardware, assuming static qubit positions and fixed coupling maps. This prevents them from representing the unique computational capabilities of emerging technologies such as neutral atoms, which feature dynamic qubit rearrangement and zoned operations. As a result, although numerous specialized compilers for neutral atom devices already exist, they cannot retrieve the hardware information they need through these ecosystems - creating a technology lock that hinders or even prevents the integration of neutral atom devices. In this work, we demonstrate how this limitation leads to suboptimal compilation results and can exclude certain devices entirely. Motivated by this, we propose rethinking current device models to faithfully represent neutral atom devices, enabling their seamless integration into universal quantum ecosystems. Evaluations conducted within the Quantum Device Management Interface (QDMI) demonstrate that the proposed device model unlocks a routing overhead fidelity improvement by a factor of up to 100,000 on a circuit with 16 qubits and 600 gates.
Advanced neutral atom quantum systems are being developed by the industry due to its unique hardware features that enable efficient quantum circuit execution. In fact, neutral atom quantum systems are the only platforms that simultaneously support both long-range qubit interactions and native multi-qubit gates. However, the unique characteristics of neutral atom devices limit the applicability of existing qubit mapping methods developed for other quantum devices, and the state-of-the-art mapping approach [13] for neutral atom devices suffers from long runtime and low shuttle scheduling parallelism. We introduce a novel mapping and shuttling framework for neutral atom devices. We first partition the input circuit into a sequence of subcircuits, each associated with a mapping that enables the execution of all gates in the subcircuit. To find these mappings efficiently, we adopt a flexible strategy that dynamically switches between two mapping search methods. Then, for each pair of consecutive mappings, we schedule the shuttling operations required to transition between them and prioritize timing-critical operations to improve parallelism. We performed experiments on three benchmark sets, including circuits with up to 1617 qubits and more than 100,000 gates. Our proposed framework resulted in high-quality routing solutions and consistently achieves higher fidelity with shorter runtime compared to existing approaches.
Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQC) are emerging as a promising, scalable quantum computing platform because of their long qubit coherence, flexible qubit arrangement, and multiqubit gate capabilities. However, circuit execution often requires physically moving qubits, making compilation a critical optimization challenge. We propose a circuit independent mathematical framework built on graph-theoretic combinatorial optimization that determines the minimal number of required qubit transfers. This model captures spatial constraints specific to NAQC platforms with zone-limited gate operations and multi-qubit gates. From this framework, we encode the qubit mapping problem as a nonlinear integer program and solve it using a genetic algorithm, enabling trade-offs between minimizing the total traveled distance and the number of parallel transfer operations. Compared to the state-of-the-art scalable compiler for zoned architectures, our approach consistently finds fewer transfers. Depending on the optimization focus, our method produces shorter traveled distances or fewer parallel transfer operations. This work provides both theoretical guaranties and a practical tool for efficient, architecture-aware quantum circuit compilation. As a result, practitioners can generate hardware-aware mappings that reduce movement-induced errors and better exploit atom transfer parallelism, directly improving execution efficiency on NAQC devices.
The pursuit of a universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer has transformed quantum computing from a predominantly theoretical discipline into a rapidly diversifying hardware ecosystem. This review presents a comprehensive and technically grounded analysis of the principal physical qubit modalities: superconducting circuits, trapped ions, photonic platforms, neutral atoms, semiconductor spin qubits, and topological approaches, focusing on their underlying operating principles, performance characteristics, and system-level constraints. We examine how these qubit technologies are embedded within scalable quantum processor architectures, including control and readout infrastructures, connectivity topologies, and quantum error correction strategies. The review provides a comparative study of key performance metrics, such as coherence times, gate fidelities, error rates, and scalability, reveals fundamental trade-offs between speed, robustness, and operational complexity that shape distinct technological roadmaps and target applications. We further highlight the ongoing transition from noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices toward architectures centred on logical qubits, driven by advances in materials engineering, precision control, and quantum information theory. Together, these developments sketch the emerging routes toward fault-tolerant quantum computing and practical quantum advantage, while offering readers a coherent entry point and reference guide to the current quantum hardware landscape.
Recent experimental achievements have demonstrated the potential of neutral atom architectures for fault-tolerant quantum computing. These architectures feature the dynamic rearrangement of atoms during computation-enabling nearly arbitrary two-dimensional rearrangements. Additionally, they employ a zoned layout with dedicated regions for entangling, storage, and readout. This architecture requires design automation software that efficiently compiles quantum circuits to this hardware and takes care that atoms are in the right place at the right time. In this paper, we initiate this line of work by providing, (1) an abstract model of the novel architecture and, (2) an efficient solution to the routing problem of entangling gates. By this, we aim to maximize the parallelism of entangling gates and minimize the overhead caused by the routing of atoms between zones. In addition to that, we keep the realm of fault-tolerant quantum computing in mind and consider logical qubit arrays, each of which encodes one logical qubit. We implemented the proposed idea as a tool called NALAC and demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency by showing that it can significantly reduce the routing overhead of logical entangling gates compared to the naive approach. As part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT), NALAC is publicly available as open-source at https://github.com/cda-tum/mqt-qmap.
Quantum computers are moving into HPC centers, and the main challenge is now integration rather than pure hardware access. Many current software paths still depend on vendor-specific adapter chains between user SDKs, schedulers, and backend APIs. This pattern makes operations more complex than necessary and slows the transition from pilots to production workflows. We present a practical integration path centered on the Quantum Device Management Interface (QDMI). Using IQM superconducting systems as a hardware case study, we implement an IQM-backed QDMI layer and connect it to two software layers that HPC centers working with quantum computers already care about: Slurm-based job execution and Qiskit-facing user workflows. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/iqm-finland/QDMI-on-IQM. The key message is simple: integrating quantum hardware into HPC does not have to be a bespoke engineering effort for each backend. Once the software-hardware boundary is standardized, large parts of the stack become reusable across providers and deployment styles. Our results do not claim that standardization eliminates all HPCQC challenges. They show that this specific boundary can already be standardized today in a way that is practical for users, operators, and vendors.
Quantum computing promises to solve previously intractable problems, with neutral atoms emerging as a promising technology. Zoned neutral atom architectures allow for immense parallelism and higher coherence times by shielding idling atoms from interference with laser beams. However, in addition to hardware, successful quantum computation requires sophisticated software support, particularly compilers that optimize quantum algorithms for hardware execution. In the compilation flow for zoned neutral atom architectures, the effective interplay of the placement and routing stages decides the overhead caused by rearranging the atoms during the quantum computation. Suboptimal placements can lead to unnecessary serialization of the rearrangements in the subsequent routing stage. Despite this, all existing compilers treat placement and routing independently thus far—focusing solely on minimizing travel distances. This work introduces the first routing-aware placement method to address this shortcoming. It groups compatible movements into parallel rearrangement steps to minimize both rearrangement steps and travel distances. The implementation utilizing the A* algorithm reduces the rearrangement time by 17% on average and by 49% in the best case compared to the state-of-the-art. The complete code is publicly available in open-source as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) at https://github.com/cda-tum/mqt-qmap.