Fault-tolerance is the future of quantum computing, ensuring error-corrected quantum computation that can be used for practical applications. Resource requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) are daunting, and hence, compilation techniques must be designed to ensure resource efficiency. There is a growing need for compilation strategies tailored to the early FTQC regime, which refers to the first generation of fault-tolerant machines operating under stringent resource constraints of fewer physical qubits and limited distillation capacity. Present-day compilation techniques are largely focused on overprovisioning of routing paths and make liberal assumptions regarding the availability of distillation factories. Our work develops compilation techniques that are tailored to the needs of early FTQC systems, including distillation-adaptive qubit layouts and routing techniques. In particular, we show that simple greedy heuristics are extremely effective for this problem, offering significant reduction in the number of qubits compared to prior works. Our techniques offer results with an average overhead of 1.2× in execution time for a 53 % reduction in qubits against the theoretical lower bounds. As the industry develops early FTQC systems with tens to hundreds of logical qubits over the coming years, our work has the potential to be widely useful for optimising program executions.
Fault-tolerance is the future of quantum computing, ensuring error-corrected quantum computation that can be used for practical applications. Resource requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) are daunting, and hence, compilation techniques must be designed to ensure resource efficiency. There is a growing need for compilation strategies tailored to the early FTQC regime, which refers to the first generation of fault-tolerant machines operating under stringent resource constraints of fewer physical qubits and limited distillation capacity. Present-day compilation techniques are largely focused on overprovisioning of routing paths and make liberal assumptions regarding the availability of distillation factories. Our work develops compilation techniques that are tailored to the needs of early FTQC systems, including distillation-adaptive qubit layouts and routing techniques. In particular, we show that simple greedy heuristics are extremely effective for this problem, offering significant reduction in the number of qubits compared to prior works. Our techniques offer results with an average overhead of 1.2× in execution time for a 53 % reduction in qubits against the theoretical lower bounds. As the industry develops early FTQC systems with tens to hundreds of logical qubits over the coming years, our work has the potential to be widely useful for optimising program executions.
Fault-tolerance is the future of quantum computing, ensuring error-corrected quantum computation that can be used for practical applications. Resource requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) are daunting, and hence, compilation techniques must be designed to ensure resource efficiency. There is a growing need for compilation strategies tailored to the early FTQC regime, which refers to the first generation of fault-tolerant machines operating under stringent resource constraints of fewer physical qubits and limited distillation capacity. Present-day compilation techniques are largely focused on overprovisioning of routing paths and make liberal assumptions regarding the availability of distillation factories. Our work develops compilation techniques that are tailored to the needs of early FTQC systems, including distillation-adaptive qubit layouts and routing techniques. In particular, we show that simple greedy heuristics are extremely effective for this problem, offering up to 60% reduction in the number of qubits compared to prior works. Our techniques offer results with an average overhead of 1.2X in execution time for a 53% reduction in qubits against the theoretical lower bounds. As the industry develops early FTQC systems with tens to hundreds of logical qubits over the coming years, our work has the potential to be widely useful for optimising program executions.
Fault-tolerance is the future of quantum computing, ensuring error-corrected quantum computation that can be used for practical applications. Resource requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) are daunting, and hence, compilation techniques must be designed to ensure resource efficiency. There is a growing need for compilation strategies tailored to the early FTQC regime, which refers to the first generation of fault-tolerant machines operating under stringent resource constraints of fewer physical qubits and limited distillation capacity. Present-day compilation techniques are largely focused on overprovisioning of routing paths and make liberal assumptions regarding the availability of distillation factories. Our work develops compilation techniques that are tailored to the needs of early FTQC systems, including distillation-adaptive qubit layouts and routing techniques. In particular, we show that simple greedy heuristics are extremely effective for this problem, offering up to 60% reduction in the number of qubits compared to prior works. Our techniques offer results with an average overhead of 1.2X in execution time for a 53% reduction in qubits against the theoretical lower bounds. As the industry develops early FTQC systems with tens to hundreds of logical qubits over the coming years, our work has the potential to be widely useful for optimising program executions.
Fault-tolerance is the future of quantum computing, ensuring error-corrected quantum computation that can be used for practical applications. Resource requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) are daunting, and hence, compilation techniques must be designed to ensure resource efficiency. There is a growing need for compilation strategies tailored to the early FTQC regime, which refers to the first generation of fault-tolerant machines operating under stringent resource constraints of fewer physical qubits and limited distillation capacity. Present-day compilation techniques are largely focused on overprovisioning of routing paths and make liberal assumptions regarding the availability of distillation factories. Our work develops compilation techniques that are tailored to the needs of early FTQC systems, including distillation-adaptive qubit layouts and routing techniques. In particular, we show that simple greedy heuristics are extremely effective for this problem, offering significant reduction in the number of qubits compared to prior works. Our techniques offer results with an average overhead of 1.2× in execution time for a 53 \% reduction in qubits against the theoretical lower bounds. As the industry develops early FTQC systems with tens to hundreds of logical qubits over the coming years, our work has the potential to be widely useful for optimising program executions.
Scalable quantum computation is expected to rely on fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC), in which quantum error correction (QEC) suppresses physical errors sufficiently to support reliable logical operations. This requires quantum compilation to move beyond general-purpose circuit optimization toward encoding-aware and protocol-structured compilation across the full stack of fault-tolerant quantum computers. Beyond circuit synthesis and hardware mapping, an FTQC compiler must lower algorithm-level operations into the logical gate set supported by the chosen code, coordinate encoded data and ancilla resources, realize logical operations together with repeated syndrome extraction under hardware constraints, and provide the resulting measurement stream to real-time decoding.
This survey presents a full-stack view of compiler design for QEC-protected quantum computation. We organize existing work into three interacting layers: logical-level QEC compilation, physical-level QEC realization, and decoder runtime integration. At the logical level, we review surface-code lattice-surgery compilers, beyond-surface-code code-surgery frameworks including emerging qLDPC approaches, and compilation support for non-Clifford operations such as magic-state distillation and code switching. At the physical level, we survey hardware-aware QEC realization on superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom platforms. We further examine decoder models, real-time decoding systems, and frame-management mechanisms that close the feedback loop during fault-tolerant execution. Finally, we identify open challenges in cross-layer optimization, qLDPC compilation, compiler-decoder co-design, runtime adaptivity, and the development of integrated and benchmarkable FTQC compilation stacks. An actively maintained paper list is available at: github.com/chenghongz/QEC-compiler-design.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) is essential for large-scale quantum computation, but realizing useful application throughput requires coordinating resource preparation, assignment, routing, and logical execution under strict hardware and timing constraints. Many FTQC compilation approaches construct offline schedules using nominal or fixed magic-state factory throughput. Such schedules cannot respond to stochastic resource-preparation and teleportation outcomes, leading to execution stalls and hardware underutilization. In this work, we introduce FT-Weave, a stage-aware real-time FTQC compilation framework that jointly coordinates resource preparation, resource assignment, teleportation routing, and correction handling. By adapting to runtime resource availability and hardware constraints, FT-Weave allows preparation, communication, and logical execution to overlap. We instantiate FT-Weave on two representative neutral-atom, early FTQC architectures: transversal STAR and a T-state cultivation architecture. Under the evaluated hardware and latency model, FT-Weave achieves a speedup of up to 3X over a baseline compilation flow for simulations of the two-dimensional transverse-field Ising model. In the case study, we further find that maximizing exposed concurrency does not necessarily minimize execution time. Although fine-grained asynchronous execution can reduce local idle time, its smaller optimization windows and increased routing contention can outweigh these gains. Together, these results show that effective runtime coordination, rather then exposed parallelism alone, determines how efficiently FTQC resources translate into application throughput:FT-Weave provides a blueprint for solving this real-time orchestration problem across resource protocols and architectures.
Achieving quantum speedups in practical tasks remains challenging for current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. These devices always encounter significant obstacles such as inevitable physical errors and the limited scalability of current near-term algorithms. Meanwhile, assuming a typical architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC), realistic applications inevitably require a vast number of qubits, typically exceeding 10 6 , which seems far beyond near-term realization. In this work, to bridge the gap between the NISQ and FTQC eras, we propose an alternative approach to achieve practical quantum advantages on early-FTQC devices. Our framework is based on partially fault-tolerant logical operations to minimize spatial overhead and avoids the costly distillation techniques typically required for executing non-Clifford gates. To this end, we develop a space-time efficient state preparation protocol to generate an ancillary non-Clifford state consumed for implementing an analog rotation gate with an arbitrary small angle θ and a remarkably low worst-case error rate below O ( | θ | p ph ) , where p ph is the physical error rate. Furthermore, we propose several error suppression schemes tailored to our preparation protocol, which are essential to minimize the overhead for mitigating errors. Based on this framework, we present several promising applications that leverage the potential of our framework, including the Trotter simulation and quantum phase estimation (QPE). Notably, we demonstrate that our framework allows us to perform the QPE for an ( 8 × 8 ) -site Hubbard model with fewer than 6.8 × 10 4 qubits and an execution time of 10.6 days (or 14 min with full parallelization) under p ph = 10 − 4 , which is significantly faster than recent classical estimation with tensor network techniques (density matrix renormalization group and projected entangled pair states).