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arXiv:quant-ph/0604001 · IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems

Quantum Circuit Simplification and Level Compaction

Dmitri A Maslov, Gerhard W. Dueck, D. Michael Miller, C. Negrevergne

Published Feb 21, 2008• 252 citations
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Abstract

Quantum circuits are time-dependent diagrams describing the process of quantum computation. Usually, a quantum algorithm must be mapped into a quantum circuit. Optimal synthesis of quantum circuits is intractable, and heuristic methods must be employed. With the use of heuristics, the optimality of circuits is no longer guaranteed. In this paper, we consider a local optimization technique based on templates to simplify and reduce the depth of nonoptimal quantum circuits. We present and analyze templates in the general case and provide particular details for the circuits composed of NOT, CNOT, and controlled-sqrt-of-NOT gates. We apply templates to optimize various common circuits implementing multiple control Toffoli gates and quantum Boolean arithmetic circuits. We also show how templates can be used to compact the number of levels of a quantum circuit. The runtime of our implementation is small, whereas the reduction in the number of quantum gates and number of levels is significant.

DOI
10.1109/tcad.2007.911334

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Quantum circuits are time-dependent diagrams describing the process of quantum computation. Usually, a quantum algorithm must be mapped into a quantum circuit. Optimal synthesis of quantum circuits is intractable, and heuristic methods must be employed. With the use of heuristics, the optimality of circuits is no longer guaranteed. In this paper, we consider a local optimization technique based on templates to simplify and reduce the depth of nonoptimal quantum circuits. We present and analyze templates in the general case and provide particular details for the circuits composed of NOT, CNOT, and controlled-sqrt-of-NOT gates. We apply templates to optimize various common circuits implementing multiple control Toffoli gates and quantum Boolean arithmetic circuits. We also show how templates can be used to compact the number of levels of a quantum circuit. The runtime of our implementation is small, whereas the reduction in the number of quantum gates and number of levels is significant.
Optimal synthesis of quantum circuits is intractable and heuristic methods must be employed. Templates are a general approach to reversible quantum circuit simplification. We consider the use of templates to simplify a quantum circuit initially found by other means. We present and analyze templates in the general case, and then provide particular details for circuits composed of NOT, CNOT and controlled-sqrt-of-NOT gates. We introduce templates for this set of gates and apply them to simplify both known quantum realizations of Toffoli gates and circuits found by earlier heuristic Fredkin and Toffoli gate synthesis algorithms. While the number of templates is quite small, the reduction in quantum cost is often significant.
Efficiency of a quantum computation realized in a circuit form depends on many parameters including (but not limited to) the number of gates, the number of auxiliary bits and the number of logic levels. While researchers paid some attention to the minimization of the number of gates and the number of auxiliary bits, the problem of minimizing the number of levels was set aside. However, gates that do not involve the same bits may be applied in parallel. In this paper we present an automated level compactor for quantum circuits. At its core are the templates -a local optimization tool developed for quantum/reversible circuit simplification. We show how the templates can be applied to compact logic levels in quantum circuits, which extends the boundaries of their usefulness. While our method for level compaction is basic, its application to the benchmark circuit specifications shows it has good potential.
Quantum computers, more specifically quantum circuits, take on the eyes with their computational promises such as reversibility. In this paper, we perform synthesis and optimization of quantum circuits. In the first part, we propose a fast synthesis algorithm that implements any given reversible Boolean function with quantum gates. Instead of an exhaustive search on every given function, our algorithm creates a library of essential functions and performs sorting. As an example, to implement 4 bit circuits we only use 120 essential functions out of all 20922789888000 functions. In the second part, we optimize our circuits by using new templates. The proposed templates mainly consist of Toffoli gates with negative and positive controlling lines. These templates also show us that optimum area solutions proposed in the literature are not actually optimum; they can be improved.
This thesis investigates techniques for the automated optimization of quantum circuits. In the first part we develop an exponential time algorithm for synthesizing minimal depth quantum circuits. We combine this with effective heuristics for reducing the search space, and show how it can be extended to different optimization problems. We then use the algorithm to compute circuits over the Clifford group and T gate for many of the commonly used quantum gates, improving upon the former best known circuits in many cases. \n \nIn the second part, we present a polynomial time algorithm for the re-synthesis of CNOT and T gate circuits while reducing the number of phase gates and parallelizing them. We then describe different methods for expanding this algorithm to optimize circuits over Clifford and T gates.
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.
Quantum Boolean circuit (QBC) synthesis issues are becoming a key area of research in the domain of quantum computing. While Minterm gate based synthesis and Reed-Muller based canonical decomposition techniques are adopted commonly, nearest neighbor synthesis technique for QBC utilizes the quantum logic gates involving only the adjacent target and control qbits for a given quantum network. Instead of Quantum Boolean circuit synthesis using (SNOT gate, we have chosen the template-based technique for synthesis of QBC. This work defines new minimization rules using nearest neighbor templates, which results in reduced number of quantum gates and circuit levels. The need of proper relative placements of the quantum gates in order to achieve the minimum gate configuration has also been discussed.