College of Science & Engineering

FPGA Based Qubit Control and Readout Implementation

Supervisor: Dr Roghaieh Parvizi and Dr Atif Jafri

Industry Partner: Xilinx AMD

School: Engineering

Description:

One of the most significant challenges in building a large-scale quantum computer (QC) is minimizing its size, which is currently not feasible due to the separation of components that operate at different temperature conditions. Specifically, the quantum bits (qubits) must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures (CT), while the control and readout systems must function at room temperature (RT). This temperature disparity presents a major obstacle in achieving a compact QC design. Currently different open-source implementation solutions are available for qubit control and readout of qubits. These solutions are developed for RT applications using FPGAs. One of these solutions, called QICK (Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit) is proposed in [1] for which open-source solution is available at [2]. This solution has two major digital circuits i.e. micro-sequencer and signal generator and uses AMD Xilinx RFSoC board. Since, this solution is made for RT, there is a need to optimize it for low power implementation to bring to CT.

In this research solution, the signal generator of QICK shall be taken as base solution and efforts shall be made to make it power optimized solution while taking dilution chamber power ratings into consideration so that it can be made functional for CT. In this regard, at first the open-source solution shall be made functional using AMD Xilinx RFSoC 4x2 board at Microelectronics Lab of University of Glasgow to well understand the baseline work. The second part of this project shall be related to perform literature survey on low power digital circuit implementation techniques which will be applied to propose the intended low power digital architecture of signal generator. The proposed digital architecture shall be implementation using Verilog/VHDL. Finally, the power usage results shall be generated using ASIC/FPGA design tools to compare them with base solution for comparison. Finally, an effort shall be made to publish the result in the relevant forum(s).

[1] L. Stefanazzi et al. “The QICK (Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit): Readout and control for qubits and detectors.” in Review of Scientific Instruments, Volume 93, Issue 4, April 2022.

[2] QICK Github repository, https://github.com/openquantumhardware/qick,2021