Towards a pulse-level intermediate representation for diverse quantum control systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces pulselib, a pulse-level intermediate representation for quantum control systems, enabling faster, reusable, and device-agnostic quantum software development with performance comparable or superior to existing IRs.

Contribution

The work presents pulselib as a novel, system-independent IR with graph-based transpilation pipelines, improving speed and scalability over existing IRs for quantum control.

Findings

Pulselib achieves up to 4.5x speedup over existing IRs.

It scales favorably with the number of parameters in highly parametrized applications.

Benchmarks show performance comparable to device-specific IRs.

Abstract

A system-independent intermediate representation (IR) for pulse-level programming of quantum control systems is required to enable rapid development and reuse of quantum software across diverse platforms. In this work, we demonstrate the utility of pulselib as a candidate for such an IR. We implement graph-based IRs and transpilation pipelines for two unique frequency synthesizers and benchmark performance against existing IRs. Key elements of these pipelines are munchers and parametrizable pulse schedules. The former encodes target-specific constraints and allows translation of fundamentally system-agnostic pulse descriptions to arbitrary low-level representations, and the latter enables schedule reuse that produces savings in transpilation time relative to device-specific alternatives. Benchmarks reveal that pulselib provides performance comparable to fast, device-specific IRs while providing a speedup of up to 4.5x over existing IRs. For highly parametrized applications, pulselib provides favorable scaling of transpilation times with respect to the number of parameters and can exhibit speedups relative to existing IRs up to 69% larger than speedups provided by optimized, device-specific techniques.