Design Space Exploration for Efficient Quantum Most-Significant Digit-First Arithmetic

Quantum computing has been considered as an emerging approach in addressing problems which are not easily solvable using classical computers. In parallel to the physical implementation of quantum processors, quantum algorithms have been actively developed for real-life applications to show quantum advantages, many of which benefit from quantum arithmetic algorithms and their efficient implementations. As one of the most important operations, quantum addition has been adopted in Shor's algorithm and quantum linear algebra algorithms. Although various least-significant digit-first quantum adders have been introduced in previous work, interest in investigating the efficient implementation of most-significant digit-first addition is growing. In this work, we propose a novel design method for most-significant digit-first addition with several quantum circuit optimisations to reduce the number of quantum bits (i.e. qubits), quantum gates, and circuit depth. An open-source library of different arithmetic operators based on our proposed method is presented, where all circuits are implemented on IBM Qiskit SDK. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed design, together with the optimisation techniques, reduces T-depth by up-to 4.0×, T-count by 3.5×, and qubit consumption by 1.2×.