FPGA-based electronic system for the control and readout of superconducting quantum processors

TL;DR

This paper presents an FPGA-based electronic control and readout system for superconducting quantum processors, achieving low-latency, synchronized control, and real-time signal processing to enhance quantum computing performance.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel FPGA-based system with distributed clock architecture supporting synchronized control and real-time processing, reducing feedback latency significantly.

Findings

Achieved approximately 5 ps qubit control jitter

Reduced feedback latency to 125 ns

Demonstrated low-noise performance on fluxonium qubits

Abstract

Electronic systems for qubit control and measurement serve as a bridge between quantum programming language and quantum information processors. With the rapid development of superconducting quantum circuit (SQC) technology, synchronization in a large-scale system, low-latency execution, and low noise are required for electronic systems. Here, we present a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based electronic system with a distributed synchronous clock and trigger architecture. The system supports synchronous control of qubits with jitters of approximately 5 ps. We implement a real-time digital signal processing system in the FPGA, enabling precise timing control, arbitrary waveform generation, IQ demodulation for qubit state discrimination, and the generation of real-time qubit-state-dependent trigger signals for feedback/feedforward control. The hardware and firmware low-latency design reduces the feedback/feedforward latency of the electronic system to 125 ns, significantly less than the decoherence times of the qubit. Finally, we demonstrate the functionalities and low-noise performance of this system using a fluxonium quantum processor.