An FPGA-based quantum circuit emulation framework using heisenberg representation

Abstract

While physical realization of practical large-scale quantum computers is still ongoing, theoretical research of quantum computing applications is facilitated on classical computing platforms through simulation and emulation methods. Nevertheless, the exponential increase in resource requirement with the increase in the number of qubits is an inherent issue in classical modeling of quantum systems. In the effort to alleviate the critical scalability issue in existing FPGA emulation works, a novel FPGA-based quantum circuit emulation framework based on Heisenberg representation is proposed in this paper. Unlike previous works that are restricted to the emulations of quantum circuits of small qubit sizes, the proposed FPGA emulation framework can scale-up to 120-qubit on Altera Stratix IV FPGA for the stabilizer circuit case study while providing notable speed-up over the equivalent simulation model.