Quantum Hardware Design and Analysis Workshop

@ IEEE Quantum Week 2021

Registration available at https://qce.quantum.ieee.org/registration/.

10:45-16:45 Mountain Time (MDT), Friday, Oct 22, 2021

Abstract

How do we streamline the design and analysis of innovative superconducting quantum processors? The need for the scaling of and the growing diversity of circuit architectures makes this a question of central importance. Good solutions will need to smoothly orchestrate expertise and tools from traditionally disparate worlds. The microwave circuitry composing superconducting quantum chips can be readily simulated in classical software, but additional quantum analysis is required in order to find the Hamiltonian used to fully model the dynamics of the system, a necessary step to properly tune the quantum device. For large systems, this can be a very time consuming and complex process, requiring numerous iterations of computationally large simulations and slow feedback loops. The goal of this workshop is to bring together the diverse collection of experts in academia, industry and government, from EDA specialists to microwave engineers to quantum physicists, required to answer that question. They will discuss the current state of the field, such as established best practices and the ecosystem of open-source and commercial software. Vendors will showcase their proposed solutions for improved design and simulation, discussing where advancements are still necessary. Finally, state-of-the-art open-source endeavors that have been proposed will be presented, focusing on the community driven development and where such tools have been successful. The field has a growing need to establish software tools to enable the fast and easy design and analysis of quantum chips; this workshop aims to provide a forum for the community to do so.

Agenda

10:45 - 12:15 Academic Session

Time	Speaker	Topic
10:45	Nick Bronn	Introduction
10:50	David DiVincenzo Director of the Institute of Theoretical Nanoelectronics at Forschungszentrum Jülich & co-director JARA Institute for Quantum Information	"History of Superconducting Qubits"
		When the "qubit" arrived on the intellectual scene, circa 1995, the pioneering work to see quantum effects in superconducting circuits had already been done. But the qubit paradigm gave a tremendous boost to this field. While old samples immediately came out of the drawer for looking more at their quantum coherence, it was clear that a radical and painful redo of the experimental approach was needed to really step positively forward towards Josephson quantum computing. I will touch on the major steps of this redo, about ten years in the making. For us at IBM at the time, it was a bruising but invigorating experience.
11:35	Jonas Bylander Associate Professor @ Chalmers University of Technology	"Scalable 3D integration of high-performance superconducting qubits"
		In this talk I will show the latest results from our development of superconducting quantum processors within the Wallenberg Center for Quantum Technology at Chalmers and the EU Flagship project OpenSuperQ. We achieve 100-us transmon coherence times and near-state-of-the-art two-qubit gates in scalable flip-chip technology, with the quantum hardware residing on a “Q-chip” and the input/output wiring circuitry on a “C-chip.” This 3D integration of the quantum processor enables architectures with arrays of qubits that are individually addressable by signal routing from the perimeter of the C-chip. I will also present some of our extensive work into the understanding of fluctuating two-level state defects, which constitute the dominant source of decoherence for transmon qubits. Finally, I will briefly show our implementation of a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm, a first demonstration of improved performance by increasing the circuit depth.
11:55	Andreas Wallraff Full Professor in Physics @ ETH Zürich	TBD
		Abstract:

1:00 - 2:30 Commercial Software Session

Time	Speaker	Topic
1:00	Brian Rautio VP Operations @ Sonnet Software	"EM Simulation—when does it break?"
		As a large, multi-decade industry full of strong and reliable products, it’s easy to trust the results of your EM simulator. However, at Sonnet, we can understand that simulation is inherently going to be wrong to some degree. The question we always need to ask is, “How wrong is my answer?” It’s a spectrum and the error margins may be insignificant to alarming, and the types of things we do and the way we drive our simulators can have a significant impact on that. Pushing the limit of physics means that we may be pushing the limits of our EM simulation as well, and this talk will help navigate that concept with awareness.
1:15	Kostas Nikellis Director of R&D @ Ansys Inc.	"Large scale modeling of electromagnetic effects in superconductive silicon designs"
		The increasing size and complexity of superconductive silicon designs has resulted in additional needs in terms of electromagnetic modeling. Super-accurate modeling of inductance in various small parts of the layout and a robust crosstalk model between the physical qubits are critical for a successful design. In this session, we will present RaptorQ, an extremely high-capacity engine that boosts the limits of electromagnetic simulation to include problems that, until recently, seemed impossible to solve.
1:30	Chris Mueth Business Development, Marketing, and Technical Specialist @ Keysight Technologies	"Quantum Hardware Design and Analysis: Challenges, Technology, Workflows"
		Engineers designing Quantum qubits today face a lot of challenges. Linking the Hamiltonian world to the EDA design world must be done. From there, the engineer needs to select the right EDA technologies and understand how to apply these. Lastly, they must design the qubit in an efficient and effective manner. This paper explores the various challenges the Quantum hardware designer faces, the technology available to them, and requirements for an efficient workflow.
1:45	Davi Correia Sr. Principal Application Engineer @ Cadence Design Systems	"Clarity 3D Solver: The New Standard in 3D Electromagnetics"
		Clarity, a breakthrough in electromagnetic simulation, is going to be presented. We will explore Clarity from two perspectives. First, we will see the performance side of Clarity, and we will understand why it is much more efficient than the legacy solutions currently available in the market. We will show how Clarity uses the computational resources available to create the mesh and to solve the matrices in a completely new approach to the problem, and show examples of the performance gain. Second, we will see the integration side of Clarity, and show an example on how it can be part of your entire flow so you can focus on your design, not on exporting the geometry, setting up your EM simulation, extracting S-parameters, stitching it back into your circuit, etc. At the end we will show that if your bottleneck is performance (simulation time/capacity) or engineering time (set up time, multiple tools) Clarity can help.
2:00	Moderator John P. DeVale Group Supervisor @ The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory	Panel Discussion

3:15 - 4:45 Open-source Software Session

Time	Speaker	Topic
3:15	Jens Koch Associate Professor @ Northwestern University	"scqubits: a Python package for superconducting qubits"
		Superconducting qubits have emerged as a top technology in the pursuit of quantum computation. The quantitative modeling of such circuits is a critical cornerstone in research and development of this hardware platform. The open-source package “scqubits” streamlines the modeling of superconducting qubits and coupled circuit QED systems. This presentation will highlight package capabilities including the prediction of spectra and coherence properties, the construction of composite systems of multiple qubits and harmonic modes, and the ease of performing multi-dimensional parameter sweeps of circuit QED systems. We gratefully acknowledge support by the AFOSR under grant FA9550-20-1-0271.
3:30	Marco Facchini Senior Development Engineer @ IBM	"Qiskit Metal - Superconducting Qubit Chip Design and Analysis"
		If you start designing semiconducting quantum chips today, you are bound to face a fragmented design flow landscape. Available tools may or may not be ready to support some of the key features, and most of the quantum-specific algebra lives in ink publications. Additionally, this design flow is by nature iterative, setting the stage for time inefficiency and human-errors. We started Qiskit Metal to unify the semiconducting qubit chip design flow, and to help unify the quantum community on a framework that allows to freely share your innovation and discoveries.
3:45	Johannes Heinsoo Senior Quantum Engnieer @ IQM	KQCircuits, an open-source package for drawing automation of superconducting quantum processors
		The research field of quantum computing with superconducting qubits is maturing. There is still a lack of established open-source tools for design of quantum processing unit (QPU) elements, chips, and lithography masks. In some research groups, this task is still done by manually drawing the polygons or using locally developed software components prone to human errors and limited scalability. We present KQCircuits, a GPLv3-licensed tool developed at IQM Finland, that enables designing QPU out of parameterized elements with geometric relations. The basic elements, chips and mask can be drawn programmatically and using a graphical user interface. Masks and simulation scripts can be exported to establish a complete and robust workflow. Most standard QPU elements, and some single and multi-layer chips are provided as examples. With KQCircuits, quantum engineers are empowered to quickly develop new quantum experiments and processors while also having the opportunity to contribute to the codebase and libraries to help their peers and push the field forward.
4:00	Boxi Li PhD Candidate @ Forschungszentrum Jülich	QuTiP
		Simulating quantum dynamics is of essential importance in the design and engineering of various components in quantum hardware. The Quantum Toolbox in Python (QuTiP), one of the earliest open-source software packages in simulating quantum dynamics, has been widely used in developing qubits, quantum gates and measurement protocols. The package is now being developed under a worldwide collaboration and has grown rapidly in the last few years. In this talk, I will briefly present the basic functionality of the package and introduce a few new features that offer more flexibility in hardware simulation. In particular, in the next major version of QuTiP, qutip-v5, one will be able to define custom data types and ODE solvers as a plug-in package. Moreover, in the new sub-package, qutip-qip, we provide tools for circuit simulation at the level of time evolution, allowing studying various kinds of noise in the numerical simulation.
4:15	Moderator Yaniv Rosen Quantum Physicist @ Lawrence Livermore National Lab	Panel Discussion

Organizers

Thomas G. McConkey: IBM Quantum, USA

Zlatko Minev: IBM Quantum, USA

Nicholas Bronn: IBM Quantum, USA