SmartQCache: Fast and Precise Pulse Control With Near-Quantum Cache Design on FPGA

Quantum pulse serves as the machine language of superconducting quantum devices, which needs to be synthesized and calibrated for precise control of quantum operations. However, existing pulse control systems suffer from the dilemma between long synthesis latency and inaccuracy of quantum control systems. compute-in-CPU synthesis frameworks, like IBM Qiskit Pulse, involve massive redundant computation during pulse calculation, suffering from a high computational cost when handling large-scale circuits. On the other hand, field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based synthesis frameworks, like QuMA, faces inaccurate pulse control problem. In this article, we propose both compute-in-CPU and all-in-FPGA solutions to collaboratively solve the latency and inaccuracy problem. First, we propose QPulseLib, a novel compute-in-CPU library with reusable pulses that can directly provide the pulse of a circuit pattern. To establish this library, we transform the circuit and apply convolutional operators to extract reusable patterns and precalculate their resultant pulses. Then, we develop a matching algorithm to identify such patterns shared by the target circuit. Experiments show that QPulseLib achieves $158.46\times $ and $16.03\times $ speedup for pulse calculation, compared to Qiskit Pulse and AccQOC. Moreover, we extend the design as a fast and precise all-in-FPGA pulse control approach using near-quantum cache design, SmartQCache. To be specific, we employ a two-level cache to hold reusable pulses of frequently-used circuit patterns. Such a design enables pulse prefetching in near-quantum peripherals, dramatically reducing the end-to-end synthesis latency. To achieve precise pulse control, SmartQCache incorporates duration optimization and pulse sequence calibration to mitigate the execution errors from imperfect hardware, crosstalk, and time shift. Experimental results demonstrate that SmartQCache achieves $294.37\times $ and $145.43\times $ speedup in pulse synthesis compared to Qiskit Pulse and AccQOC. It also reduces the pulse inaccuracy by $1.27\times $ compared to QuMA.