APPLICATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY:
- Quantum computing field for academia and industry
- Enables a large spectrum of experiments for AQT users
BENEFITS:
- Designed with the idea of modularity and scalability and for large scale experiments in a cold environment
- Accompanied by various tools and solutions from RISC-V ecosystem
BACKGROUND:
- As quantum computing matures, there are advantages to be gained from a well-defined interface between software and hardware. In classical computing, such an interface is usually referred to as an instruction set architecture (ISA). A well-designed ISA can present a very compact and efficient method to access the specialized features on a computing device. Quantum ISAs include not only quantum operations but also memory load/store operations and conditional and non-conditional statements, which allows algorithm branching and measurement-based feedback support.
TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW:
Anastasiia Butko at Berkeley Lab has developed a new ISA interface between the software program (quantum circuit) and hardware (generation of the gates).
The proposed quantum ISA (QUASAR) has been designed as an extension to the RISC-V ISA. The design implementation relies on the basic functionalities of the conventional ISA. Butko described an evaluation methodology towards efficient quantum ISA designs and designed the ISA specification baseline with a suitable combination of operations for future scalability and parallelism. Then, she physically implemented the designed ISA using Hardware Description Languages (HDL). The ISA (processor) can be fully used with software support.
The present development is an improvement over other competing technologies, which are shown to be a design point without actual support from performance evaluation.
DEVELOPMENT STAGE: Proven principle
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
https://crd.lbl.gov/divisions/amcr/computer-science-amcr/cag/
https://aqt.lbl.gov/quasar-software-hardware-interface/
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9325421
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS:
STATUS: Patent pending.
OPPORTUNITIES: Available for licensing or collaborative research.
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