FPGA Based Hardware Abstraction of Quantum Computing System

Abstract

The number of transistors per unit area are increasing every year by virtue of Moore’s law. It is estimated that the current rate of evolution in the field of chip design will reduce the transistor to atomic scale by 2024. At atomic level the quantum mechanical characteristics dominate, affecting the ability of transistors to store information in the form of bits. The quantum computers have been proposed as one way to effectively deal with this predicament. The quantum computing circuits utilize the spinning characteristics of electron to store information. This paper describes a proposition of resource efficient FPGA based quantum circuit abstraction. A non-programmable embedded system capable of storing, introducing a phase shift in the qubit and its measurement is implemented. The main objective of the proposed abstraction is to provide a FPGA based platform comprising of fundamental sub blocks for designing quantum circuits. A primary quantum key distribution algorithm i.e BB84 is implemented on the proposed platform as a proof of concept. The distinguishing feature of the proposed design is the flexibility to enhance the quantum circuit emulation accuracy at the cost of computational resources. The proposed emulation exhibits two principal properties of the quantum computing i.e. parallelism and probabilistic measurement.