Control and Readout Software for Superconducting Quantum Computing

Being important parts of the superconducting quantum computer, the high-speed arbitrary waveform generator (AWG), ultraprecision dc source, and high-speed digitizer are used to manipulate the qubit. The complexity of an experimental setup increases rapidly as the number of qubits grows. Cumbersome instrument management, distortion of signals, and inefficiency of data transmission are gradually highlighted and become the bottlenecks in scaling up the number of qubits. In addition, fault-tolerant quantum computing has real-time feedback requirements of qubit states. To deal with these challenges, we propose an instrument management software design in this paper. The software maps the resources of separate instruments to a unified virtual instrument, achieving the scalability of the instruments. The processing and correction of signals are deployed on a server, which automatically corrects the distortion of the signals. By designing a multi-threaded mechanism for the AWG and a custom-defined data-link protocol for the digitizer, the efficiency of the software meets the requirements of experiments. Cooperating with the AWG and digitizer, the software provides the real-time feedback capability using an instruction compiler. Thus, the software meets the requirements of superconducting quantum computing, as demonstrated through its application to a 12-bit quantum experiment.