Automatic Test Pattern Generation for Robust Quantum Circuit Testing

TL;DR

This paper presents a new framework for automatic test pattern generation in quantum circuit testing, using stabilizer projector decomposition and Clifford circuits to improve robustness and efficiency in fault detection.

Contribution

It introduces the stabilizer projector decomposition and an SPD generation algorithm with acceleration techniques for robust quantum circuit testing.

Findings

Algorithms validated with theoretical guarantees

Effective on benchmark circuits like QFT, QV, BV

Improves robustness and efficiency in quantum testing

Abstract

Quantum circuit testing is essential for detecting potential faults in realistic quantum devices, while the testing process itself also suffers from the inexactness and unreliability of quantum operations. This paper alleviates the issue by proposing a novel framework of automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) for robust testing of logical quantum circuits. We introduce the stabilizer projector decomposition (SPD) for representing the quantum test pattern, and construct the test application (i.e., state preparation and measurement) using Clifford-only circuits, which are rather robust and efficient as evidenced in the fault-tolerant quantum computation. However, it is generally hard to generate SPDs due to the exponentially growing number of the stabilizer projectors. To circumvent this difficulty, we develop an SPD generation algorithm, as well as several acceleration techniques which can exploit both locality and sparsity in generating SPDs. The effectiveness of our algorithms are validated by 1) theoretical guarantees under reasonable conditions, 2) experimental results on commonly used benchmark circuits, such as Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), Quantum Volume (QV) and Bernstein-Vazirani (BV) in IBM Qiskit.