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IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering

Emulation of Quantum Algorithms Using CMOS Analog Circuits

Sharan Mourya, Brian R. La Cour, Bibhu Datta Sahoo

Published Jan 1, 2023• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum computers are regarded as the future of computing, as they are believed to be capable of solving extremely complex problems that are intractable on conventional digital computers. However, near-term quantum computers are prone to a plethora of noise sources that are difficult to mitigate, possibly limiting their scalability and precluding us from running any useful algorithms. Quantum emulation is an alternative approach that uses classical analog hardware to emulate the properties of superposition and entanglement, thereby mimicking quantum parallelism to attain similar speeds. By contrast, the use of classical digital hardware, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), is less inefficient at emulating a quantum computer, as it does not take advantage of the fundamentally analog nature of quantum states. Consequently, this approach adds an inherent hardware overhead that also prevents scaling. In this work, an energy-efficient quantum emulator based on analog circuits realized in UMC 180-nm CMOS technology is proposed along with the design methodologies for a scalable computing architecture. A six-fold improvement in power consumption was observed over the FPGA-based approach for a ten-qubit emulation of Grover's search algorithm. The proposed emulator is also about 400 times faster than a Ryzen 5600x six-core processor performing a simulation of six-qubit Grover's search algorithm

DOI
10.1109/tqe.2023.3319599

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Quantum computers are regarded as the future of computing, as they are believed to be capable of solving extremely complex problems that are intractable on conventional digital computers. However, near-term quantum computers are prone to a plethora of noise sources that are difficult to mitigate, possibly limiting their scalability and precluding us from running any useful algorithms. Quantum emulation is an alternative approach that uses classical analog hardware to emulate the properties of superposition and entanglement, thereby mimicking quantum parallelism to attain similar speeds. By contrast, the use of classical digital hardware, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), is less inefficient at emulating a quantum computer, as it does not take advantage of the fundamentally analog nature of quantum states. Consequently, this approach adds an inherent hardware overhead that also prevents scaling. In this work, an energy-efficient quantum emulator based on analog circuits realized in UMC 180-nm CMOS technology is proposed along with the design methodologies for a scalable computing architecture. A six-fold improvement in power consumption was observed over the FPGA-based approach for a ten-qubit emulation of Grover's search algorithm. The proposed emulator is also about 400 times faster than a Ryzen 5600x six-core processor performing a simulation of six-qubit Grover's search algorithm
Hardware emulation of quantum systems can mimic more efficiently the parallel behaviour of quantum computations, thus allowing higher processing speed-up than software simulations. In this paper, an efficient hardware emulation method that employs a serial-parallel hardware architecture targeted for field programmable gate array (FPGA) is proposed. Quantum Fourier transform and Grover’s search are chosen as case studies in this work since they are the core of many useful quantum algorithms. Experimental work shows that, with the proposed emulation architecture, a linear reduction in resource utilization is attained against the pipeline implementations proposed in prior works. The proposed work contributes to the formulation of a proof-of-concept baseline FPGA emulation framework with optimization on datapath designs that can be extended to emulate practical large-scale quantum circuits.
Quantum computing (QC) leverages superposition, entanglement, and parallelism to solve complex problems that are challenging for classical computing methods. The immense potential of QC has spurred explosive interest and research in both academia and industry. However, the practicality of QC based on large-scale quantum computers remains limited by issues of scalability and error correction. To bridge this gap, QC emulators utilizing classical computing resources have emerged, with modern implementations employing FPGAs for efficiency. Nevertheless, FPGA-based QC emulators face significant limitations, particularly in standalone implementations required for low-power, low-performance devices like IoT end nodes, embedded systems, and wearable devices, due to their substantial resource demands. This paper proposes optimization techniques to reduce resource requirements and enable standalone FPGA implementations of QC emulators. We specifically focused on Grover's algorithm, known for its excellent performance in searching unstructured databases. The proposed resource-saving optimization techniques allow for the emulation of the largest possible Grover's algorithm within the constrained resources of FPGAs. Using these optimization techniques, we developed a hardware accelerator for Grover's algorithm and integrated it with a RISC-V processor architecture. We completed a standalone Grover's algorithm-specific emulator operating on FPGAs, demonstrating significant performance enhancements and resource savings afforded by the proposed techniques.
With rapid advancement in quantum computing technology, continuous efforts are being directed to simulation and emulation of quantum algorithms on classical platforms. A well-known limitation to classical emulation of quantum circuits is scalability. Existing hardware emulators implement gate-based circuit models of quantum circuits that result in heavy resource utilization and degrade the scalability of the system. Also, current quantum emulation hardware use fixedpoint arithmetic, which has an adverse effect on accuracy when the system is scaled up. In this work, we employ a complexmultiply-and-accumulate (CMAC) and lookup-based emulation approach that greatly reduces resource utilization and improves system scalability in terms of number of emulated qubits. We demonstrate emulation of up to 16 fully-entangled qubits which is highest among existing work. We design fully-pipelined, highthroughput hardware architectures that use floating-point precision for higher accuracy. Experimental evaluation and analysis of the architectures in terms of speed and area is also provided. The emulator is prototyped on a high-performance reconfigurable computing (HPRC) system and our results demonstrate quantitative improvement over existing Field-Programmable-Gate-Array (FPGA)-based hardware emulators.
Quantum algorithms can be efficiently emulated on classical hardware such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), achieving significant speedup over software simulations. However, the increase in the required hardware resources for emulating quantum systems becomes a critical limitation as the number of qubits is increased. In this paper, we propose a scalable emulation framework for modeling quantum algorithms on FPGAs that employs efficient resource scheduling such as space and space-time scheduling. In addition, full floating point precision arithmetic and dataflow non-linear (dynamic) pipelining are also used to achieve higher accuracy and higher throughput. We propose scalable and optimized hardware architectures for Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) and Grover's search algorithm and demonstrate the scalability of our framework by scaling the system up to 5 fully-entangled qubits. A multi-node (multi-FPGA), state-of-the-art high-performance reconfigurable computer (HPRC) was used for implementation of the proposed architectures. Our experimental results show that by employing efficient resource scheduling techniques, the hardware resource constraints could be mitigated and the proposed emulation framework could be made feasible for emulation of more complex, larger-scale quantum algorithms while maintaining higher accuracy and throughput than existing work.
Quantum computing is regarded as the future of computing that hopefully provides exponentially large processing power compared to the conventional digital computing. However, current quantum computers do not have the capability to correct errors caused by environmental noise, so that it is difficult to run useful algorithms that require deep quantum circuits. Therefore, emulation of quantum circuits in digital computers is essential. However, emulation of large quantum circuits requires enormous amount of computations, and leads to a very large processing time. To reduce the processing time, we propose an FPGA emulator with high-bandwidth-memory to emulate quantum Fourier transform (QFT), which is a major part of many quantum algorithms. The proposed FPGA emulator is scalable in terms of both processing speed and the number of qubits, and extendable to multiple FPGAs. We performed QFT emulations up to 30 qubits using two FPGAs. According to the measured results, we have achieved 23.6 ~ 24.5 times speed-up compared to a fully optimized 24-core CPU emulator.
It can be shown that if quantum algorithms run on quantum computers, their processing speeds improve exponentially compared to their classical counterparts. However, due to the lack of quantum computers circuit model of quantum algorithms are currently simulated using classical computers to verify their functionalities. On the other hand, software simulation cannot use the intrinsic parallelism of quantum algorithm efficiently. To address the problem, in this paper hardware emulation of quantum algorithms are discussed. To emulate quantum algorithms using FPGAs, a new representation for quantum bits is emulated that improves the emulation of quantum circuits considerably. This representation could be used in both distinct and entangle qubit states.