We provide evidence that commonly held intuitions when designing quantum circuits can be misleading. In particular we show that: a) reducing the T-count can increase the total depth; b) it may be beneficial to trade CNOTs for measurements in NISQ circuits; c) measurement-based uncomputation of relative phase Toffoli ancillae can make up to 30% of a circuits depth; d) area and volume cost metrics can misreport the resource analysis. Our findings assume that qubits are and will remain a very scarce resource. The results are applicable for both NISQ and QECC protected circuits. Our method uses multiple ways of decomposing Toffoli gates into Clifford+T gates. We illustrate our method on addition and multiplication circuits using ripple-carry. As a byproduct result we show systematically that for a practically significant range of circuit widths, ripple-carry addition circuits are more resource efficient than the carry-lookahead addition ones. The methods and circuits were implemented in the open-source QUANTIFY software.
We present some basic integer arithmetic quantum circuits, such as adders and multipliers-accumulators of various forms, as well as diagonal operators, which operate on multilevel qudits. The integers to be processed are represented in an alternative basis after they have been Fourier transformed. Several arithmetic circuits operating on Fourier transformed integers have appeared in the literature for two level qubits. Here we extend these techniques on multilevel qudits, as they may offer some advantages relative to qubits implementations. The arithmetic circuits presented can be used as basic building blocks for higher level algorithms such as quantum phase estimation, quantum simulation, quantum optimization etc., but they can also be used in the implementation of a quantum fractional Fourier transform as it is shown in a companion work presented separately.
Quantum resource analysis is crucial for designing quantum circuits as well as assessing the viability of arbitrary (error-corrected) quantum computations. To this end, we introduce QUANTIFY, which is an open-source framework for the quantitative analysis of quantum circuits. It is based on Google Cirq and is developed with Clifford+T circuits in mind, and it includes the necessary methods to handle Toffoli+H and more generalised controlled quantum gates, too. Key features of QUANTIFY include: (1) analysis and optimisation methods which are compatible with the surface code, (2) choice between different automated (mixed polarity) Toffoli gate decompositions, (3) semi-automatic quantum circuit rewriting and quantum gate insertion methods that take into account known gate commutation rules, and (4) novel optimiser types that can be combined with different verification methods (e.g. truth table or circuit invariants like number of wires). For benchmarking purposes QUANTIFY includes quantum memory and quantum arithmetic circuits. Experimental results show that the frameworks performance scales to circuits with thousands of qubits.
Most research in quantum computing today is performed against simulations of quantum computers rather than true quantum computers. Simulating a quantum computer entails implementing all of the unitary operators corresponding to the quantum gates as tensors. For high numbers of qubits, performing tensor multiplications for these simulations becomes quite expensive, since $N$-qubit gates correspond to $2^{N}$-dimensional tensors. One way to accelerate such a simulation is to use field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware to efficiently compute the matrix multiplications. Though FPGAs can efficiently perform tensor multiplications, they are memory bound, having relatively small block random access memory. One way to potentially reduce the memory footprint of a quantum computing system is to represent it as a tensor network; tensor networks are a formalism for representing compositions of tensors wherein economical tensor contractions are readily identified. Thus we explore tensor networks as a means to reducing the memory footprint of quantum computing systems and broadly accelerating simulations of such systems.
Quantum computation is traditionally expressed in terms of quantum bits, or qubits. In this work, we instead consider three-level qu$trits$. Past work with qutrits has demonstrated only constant factor improvements, owing to the $log_2(3)$ binary-to-ternary compression factor. We present a novel technique using qutrits to achieve a logarithmic depth (runtime) decomposition of the Generalized Toffoli gate using no ancilla--a significant improvement over linear depth for the best qubit-only equivalent. Our circuit construction also features a 70x improvement in two-qudit gate count over the qubit-only equivalent decomposition. This results in circuit cost reductions for important algorithms like quantum neurons and Grover search. We develop an open-source circuit simulator for qutrits, along with realistic near-term noise models which account for the cost of operating qutrits. Simulation results for these noise models indicate over 90% mean reliability (fidelity) for our circuit construction, versus under 30% for the qubit-only baseline. These results suggest that qutrits offer a promising path towards scaling quantum computation.
We generalize quantum circuits for the Toffoli gate presented by Selinger and Jones for functionally controlled NOT gates, i.e., $X$ gates controlled by arbitrary $n$-variable Boolean functions. Our constructions target the gate set consisting of Clifford gates and single qubit rotations by arbitrary angles. Our constructions use the Walsh-Hadamard spectrum of Boolean functions and build on the work by Schuch and Siewert and Welch et al. We present quantum circuits for the case where the target qubit is in an arbitrary state as well as the special case where the target is in a known state. Additionally, we present constructions that require no auxiliary qubits and constructions that have a rotation depth of 1.