Design of an FPGA-Based Neutral Atom Rearrangement Accelerator for Quantum Computing

TL;DR

This paper presents the first FPGA-based hardware acceleration for neutral atom rearrangement in quantum computing, significantly reducing processing time and enabling scalable, high-speed assembly of atom arrays for quantum systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel FPGA implementation of a quadrant-based rearrangement algorithm that enables parallel, fast assembly of atom arrays, improving over prior CPU and FPGA methods.

Findings

Achieved 54x speedup over CPU implementation.

Achieved 300x speedup over previous FPGA work.

Completed rearrangement of 30x30 array in approximately 1 microsecond.

Abstract

Neutral atoms have emerged as a promising technology for implementing quantum computers due to their scalability and long coherence times. However, the execution frequency of neutral atom quantum computers is constrained by image processing procedures, particularly the assembly of defect-free atom arrays, which is a crucial step in preparing qubits (atoms) for execution. To optimize this assembly process, we propose a novel quadrant-based rearrangement algorithm that employs a divide-and-conquer strategy and also enables the simultaneous movement of multiple atoms, even across different columns and rows. We implement the algorithm on FPGA to handle each quadrant independently (hardware-level optimization) while maximizing parallelization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first hardware acceleration work for atom rearrangement, and it significantly reduces the processing time. This achievement also contributes to the ongoing efforts of tightly integrating quantum accelerators into High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Tested on a Zynq RFSoC FPGA at 250 MHz, our hardware implementation is able to complete the rearrangement process of a 30$\times$30 compact target array, derived from a 50$\times$50 initial loaded array, in approximately 1.0 $\mu s$. Compared to a comparable CPU implementation and to state-of-the-art FPGA work, we achieved about 54$\times$ and 300$\times$ speedups in the rearrangement analysis time, respectively. Additionally, the FPGA-based acceleration demonstrates good scalability, allowing for seamless adaptation to varying sizes of the atom array, which makes this algorithm a promising solution for large-scale quantum systems.