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QProgram: A Hardware-Agnostic DSL for Portable Pulse-Level Quantum Programming

Vyron Vasileiadis, Flavie Le Bars, David Arcos

Published Jul 20, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Every quantum operation is ultimately a timed analog control signal, yet pulse-level experiment code usually tangles the science of an experiment together with one vendor’s software stack and one qubit’s wiring. The protocol, the sweeps, and the calibration all end up bound to the machine they were written on, so moving to new hardware often means rewriting the experiment from scratch. QProgram keeps these two concerns apart. You describe what should happen, and the platform decides how to run it on real instruments. A platform is any quantum control system that speaks one small, standard interface. An experiment written this way becomes a portable, inspectable program object rather than a throwaway script. It saves to a round-trip-safe .qp text file, moves to another chip without a rewrite, and is checked against each platform’s capabilities with an explicit host-side and real-time execution plan before anything runs, while new vendor operations can be added without touching the core.

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.21668593

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Every quantum operation is ultimately a timed analog control signal, yet pulse-level experiment code usually tangles the science of an experiment together with one vendor’s software stack and one qubit’s wiring. The protocol, the sweeps, and the calibration all end up bound to the machine they were written on, so moving to new hardware often means rewriting the experiment from scratch. QProgram keeps these two concerns apart. You describe what should happen, and the platform decides how to run it on real instruments. A platform is any quantum control system that speaks one small, standard interface. An experiment written this way becomes a portable, inspectable program object rather than a throwaway script. It saves to a round-trip-safe .qp text file, moves to another chip without a rewrite, and is checked against each platform’s capabilities with an explicit host-side and real-time execution plan before anything runs, while new vendor operations can be added without touching the core.
This work presents a pulse-level programming interface for superconducting processor control using QProgram, a hardware-agnostic framework for digital and analog quantum systems. The approach combines programmable pulse sequences with a structured description of the laboratory setup, integrating instrument configuration, calibrated device information, pulse optimization, compilation, and execution. The methodology supports waveform generation, measurement, parameter sweeps, and synchronization, illustrated through a qubit coherence experiment. Digital predistortion compensates for signal distortions along the control lines, while linear crosstalk compensation enables control in physical flux coordinates. An experimental example demonstrates crosstalk correction between the two flux loops of a tunable fluxonium qubit. The contribution also highlights how this architecture supports a reusable library of characterization experiments and forms the foundation of SeQtante, an automated tool for calibrating and benchmarking digital and analog quantum systems.
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With the potential of quantum algorithms to solve intractable classical problems, quantum computing is rapidly evolving, and more algorithms are being developed and optimized. Expressing these quantum algorithms using a high-level language and making them executable on a quantum processor while abstracting away hardware details is a challenging task. First, a quantum programming language should provide an intuitive programming interface to describe those algorithms. Then a compiler has to transform the program into a quantum circuit, optimize it, and map it to the target quantum processor respecting the hardware constraints such as the supported quantum operations, the qubit connectivity, and the control electronics limitations. In this article, we propose a quantum programming framework named OpenQL, which includes a high-level quantum programming language and its associated quantum compiler. We present the programming interface of OpenQL, we describe the different layers of the compiler and how we can provide portability over different qubit technologies. Our experiments show that OpenQL allows the execution of the same high-level algorithm on two different qubit technologies, namely superconducting qubits and Si-Spin qubits. Besides the executable code, OpenQL also produces an intermediate quantum assembly code, which is technology independent and can be simulated using the QX simulator.