A New Routing Strategy to Improve Success Rates of Quantum Computers

Fang Qi, Xin Fu, Xu Yuan, Nian-Feng Tzeng, Lu Peng

Abstract: In the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) Era, Quantum Computing faces significant challenges due to noise, which severely restricts the application of computing complex algorithms. Superconducting quantum chips, one of the pioneer quantum computation technologies, introduce additional noise when moving qubits to adjacent locations for operation on designated two-qubit gates. The current compilers rely on decision models that either count the swap gates or multiply the gate errors when choosing swap paths at the routing stage. Our research has unveiled the overlooked situations for error propagations through the circuit, leading to accumulations that may affect the final output.In this paper, we propose Error Propagation-Aware Routing (EPAR), designed to enhance the compilation performance by considering accumulated errors in routing. EPAR’s effectiveness is validated through benchmarks on a 27-qubit machine and two simulated systems with different topologies. The results indicate an average success rate improvement of 10% on both real and simulated heavy hex lattice topologies, along with a 16% enhancement in a mesh topology simulation. These findings underscore the potential of EPAR to advance quantum computing in the NISQ era substantially.