Linking analog to digital: scalable instrumentation for quantum computing and sensing

“Building a working quantum computer is really, really hard.” John Martinis at Google Quantum Spring Symposium. Zurich Instruments’ mission is to support scientists and engineers in that effort by providing the most advanced instrumentation to efficiently link their analog qubits with the digital domain. We offer effective solutions for setup sizes from a single to up to 100 qubits. Qubit control requires the orchestration of countless phase-coherent electrical pulses in the RF and Microwave domain to drive 1-qubit and 2-qubit gates. The high channel density HDAWG provides a low trigger-to-first-sample-out latency and dynamic sequencing capability required by many complex algorithms to achieving high fidelities. For NV centers and ions state discrimination is performed by the integrated photon counters. For superconducting qubits and quantum dots the UHFQA Quantum Analyzer can read out up to 10 readout resonators simultaneously. Measurement speed and fidelity are optimized with adjustable matched filters. To scale systems up to many qubits we offer the use of a Programmable Quantum System Controller (PQSC), that synchronizes and orchestrates all instruments to form an integrated real-time system. Its reprogrammable FPGA allows for the implementation of user-defined real-time algorithms for quantum processor control. All basic functions – qubit characterization, initialization, readout, single qubit gates, entanglement generation – have already been successfully demonstrated by our project partners Leo DiCarlo (TU Delft) and Andreas Wallraff.