The 168th R-CCS Cafe – part 3

Extensive research in material science together with outstanding engineering efforts allowed quantum technology to be significantly improved hence enabling continuing scaling of quantum circuit size. However, quantum circuit scaling itself does not guarantee any practical use without appropriate progress on the part of classical control hardware and software. To operate such a large-scale universal quantum computer with thousands of qubits, extensive classical computational resources will be required. Control hardware includes multiple layers each of which is responsible for a specific set of tasks, e.g. controllers, digital-analogue and analogue-digital converters, filters, waveform generators, etc. At this early stage of quantum architecture development, there is no clear understanding of where the upcoming challenges will be addressed through the entire stack of complex digital and analogue circuits. However, we expect that control processor will become a crucial part for successful implementation and adoption of future quantum computers.
In our talk, we discuss the challenges that classical processors will face while controlling future large-scale quantum systems. We discuss how these challenges will affect processor micro-architecture to guarantee on time quantum gate execution, continuing qubit state measurement, store and analysis, support massive parallelism and perform advanced bit manipulations on the top of the measured data.