Diagnosis of Quantum Circuits in the NISQ Era

Currently, noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) circuits may not always generate correct outputs due to noise and faults. In this work, we propose a diagnosis technique for NISQ circuits. The proposed technique contains static diagnosis and dynamic diagnosis. Static diagnosis uses a fault dictionary that contains output probability distribution for each fault. Dynamic diagnosis uses binary search to find the accurate fault locations of faulty quantum circuits. We demonstrate our technique using the Qiskit simulator with realistic noise models. We evaluate 15 benchmarks with unitary and non-unitary faults injected. Simulation results show that the average accuracy and resolution are 97.70% and 1.81. Experiments on the IBM Q devices have also been performed, and results show that our technique is feasible on real quantum circuit devices.