Understanding the Effect of Transpilation in the Reliability of Quantum Circuits

Transpiling is a necessary step to map a logical quantum algorithm to a circuit executed on a physical quantum machine, according to the available gate set and connectivity topology. Different transpiling approaches try to minimize the most critical parameters for the current transmon technology, such as Depth and CNOT number. Crucially, these approaches do not take into account the reliability of the circuit. In particular, transpilation can modify how radiation-induced transient faults propagate. In this paper, we aim at advancing the understanding of transpilation impact on fault propagation by investigating the low-level reliability of several transpiling approaches. We considered 4 quantum algorithms transpiled for 2 different architectures, increasing the number of qubits, and all possible logical-to-physical qubit mapping, adding to a total of 4, 640 transpiled circuits. We inject a total of 202, 124 faults and track their propagation. Our experiments show that by simply choosing the proper transpilation, the reliability of the circuit can improve by up to 14%.