An FPGA-based hardware abstraction of quantum computing systems

The number of transistors per unit area is increasing each year according to Moore’s law. It is estimated that the current rate of evolution in the field of chip design will reduce the size of transistors to the atomic scale by 2024. At the atomic level, quantum-mechanical characteristics dominate, affecting the ability of transistors to store information in the form of bits. Quantum computers have been proposed as one way to deal effectively with this predicament. Quantum computing circuits utilize the spin characteristics of the electron to store information. This paper describes a proposal for a resource-efficient field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based abstraction of quantum circuits. A nonprogrammable embedded system capable of storing, measuring, and introducing a phase shift in qubits is implemented. The main objective of the proposed abstraction is to provide an FPGA-based platform as the fundamental subblock for the design of quantum circuits. As a proof of concept, a primary quantum key distribution algorithm, i.e., BB84, is implemented using the proposed platform. The distinguishing feature of the proposed design is its flexibility to enhance the accuracy of quantum circuit emulation at the cost of computational resources. The proposed emulation exhibits two principal properties of quantum computing, i.e., parallelism and probabilistic measurement.