Programming a general purpose trapped-ion quantum computer

Over the past few years we have seen an explosion of new programming libraries and tools to program quantum computers that allow users to define quantum programs at the level of hardware-agnostic quantum circuits and gates that are applicable to different physical realizations of quantum computers. However, approaching quantum computing exclusively on the circuit level provides a limited perspective on the full stack of operations that physical quantum computers can perform, and is insufficient to program the entire experimental apparatus. A general purpose language, that describes both circuit-level operations as well as low-level, time-dependent hardware instructions in a cohesive manner is lacking, and experimentalists are left to write their own control system code. 

 

Here we present an overview of the language we have developed for the QuantumION platform. QuantumION is an open-access, remotely accessible trapped-ion quantum processor built at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada. Our language is designed to fully describe all operations that are required to realize a trapped-ion quantum computer, ranging from standard, hardware-agnostic quantum gates to fully customizable pulse sequences, as well as full control of  auxiliary FPGA channels to control beam pointing, electrode voltages and more. This language is tightly integrated with our custom FPGA hardware setup, but the high-level concepts that went into our language design are applicable to a much broader range of hardware implementations and we hope that our ideas will inspire and contribute to discussions towards building more streamlined experimental control systems for various architectures of quantum computers.