ICARUS-Q: Integrated Control and Readout Unit for Scalable Quantum Processors

Abstract

We present a control and measurement setup for superconducting qubits based on Xilinx 16channel radio frequency system on chip (RFSoC) device. The proposed setup consists of four parts: multiple RFSoC FPGA boards, a setup to synchronise every DAC and ADC channel across multiple boards, a low-noise DC current supply for qubit biasing and cloud access for remotely performing experiments. We also design the setup to be free of physical mixers. The FPGA boards directly generate microwave pulses using sixteen DAC channels up to the third Nyquist zone which are directly sampled by its eight ADC channels between the fifth and the ninth zones.

Measurement and control of a superconducting quantum processor with a fully-integrated radio-frequency system on a chip

“…A notable advancement in this context is the Zynq Ultra-Scale+ RFSoC, a radio-frequency system on a chip integrating RF data converters, many cores of central-processing units (CPU) and a large field-programmable gate array (FPGA), all on a single silicon chip 7 . Evaluation modules of the first generation of RFSoC chips have been used to demonstrate their applicability to quantum computation [8][9][10][11][12] . FPGA devices have been used quite extensively in scientific experiments 13 and there are many examples of their use for readout and control of superconducting qubits [14][15][16][17] .…”

Implementing quantum computing on superconducting qubits

“…This approach can also be extended to be used in qubit calibration or testing arbitrary waveform sequences for qubit control [54,58,59].…”