Quantum Architecture Research Papers

The Quantum Architecture Research Center
Paper Abstract

Building Quantum Wires: The Long and the Short of it
Mark Oskin, Fred T. Chong, Isaac L. Chuang, and John Kubiatowicz.

Appears in Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2003).

As quantum computing moves closer to reality the need for basic architectural studies becomes more pressing. Quantum wires, which transport quantum data, will be a fundamental component in all anticipated silicon quantum architectures. In this paper, we introduce a quantum wire architecture based upon quantum teleportation. We compare this teleportation channel with the traditional approach to transporting quantum data, which we refer to as the swapping channel. We characterize the latency and bandwidth of these two alternatives in a device-independent way and describe how the advanced architecture of the teleportation channel overcomes a basic limit to the maximum communication distance of the swapping channel. In addition, we discover a fundamental tension between the scale of quantum effects and the scale of the classical logic needed to control them. This "pitch-matching" problem imposes constraints on minimum wire lengths and wire intersections, which in turn imply a sparsely connected architecture of coarse-grained quantum computational elements. This is in direct contrast to the "sea of gates" architectures presently assumed by most quantum computing studies.

[ Paper: PDF (164K), Postscript (567K), Compressed Postscript (201K)]

Last modified on 04/01/2003 by John Kubiatowicz.