Efficient Quantum Circuit Design with a Standard Cell Approach, with an Application to Neutral Atom Quantum Computers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a standard cell approach for designing quantum circuits, particularly for neutral atom quantum computers, enabling faster, more efficient layouts and resource estimation compared to automatic routing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel standard cell methodology for quantum circuit design that improves layout speed, circuit depth, and resource estimation for neutral atom quantum computers.

Findings

Layout-aware routing is significantly faster than automatic methods.

Circuits designed with standard cells are at least 2.5 times shallower.

The approach enables resource estimation without complex compilation.

Abstract

We design quantum circuits by using the standard cell approach borrowed from classical circuit design, which can speed-up the layout of circuits with a regular structure. Our standard cells are general and can be used for all types of quantum circuits: error-corrected or not. The standard cell approach enables the formulation of layout-aware routing algorithms. Our method is directly applicable to neutral atom quantum computers supporting qubit shuttling. Such computers enable zoned architectures for memory, processing and measurement, and we design circuits using qubit storages (memory and measurement zones) and standard cells (processing zones). Herein, we use cubic standard cells for Toffoli gates and, starting from a 3D architecture, we design a multiplication circuit. We present evidence that, when compared with automatic routing methods, our layout-aware routers are significantly faster and achieve shallower 3D circuits (by at least 2.5x) and with a lower routing cost. Additionally, our co-design approach can be used to estimate the resources necessary for a quantum computation without using complex compilation methods. We conclude that standard cells, with the support of layout-aware routing, pave the way to very large scale methods for quantum circuit compilation.