Introduction Quantum computer architecture security research is a new and active research field. As the new year and semester is under way, this article looks back at the recent quantum computer architecture security papers published or posted online in the prior year 2022. Many of the papers are peer-reviewed research papers, while number of them are non-peer-reviewed research papers posted on web sites such as arXiv. By summarizing and reviewing the recent research papers, this article hops to give some insights and analysis of how the field of quantum computer architecture security is evol ..read more

Introduction When thinking of security and quantum computers, many people may automatically think of using quantum computers for attacks on classical computers, by use of the Grover’s and Shor’s algorithms running on the quantum computers to break a number of existing cryptographic algorithms running on classical computers. Or, terms security and quantum computers are often associated with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) or Quantum True Random Number (QTRNG) technologies. Yet, there is another aspect of security and quantum computers: security attacks on quantum computers. In particular, recen ..read more

Computing technology entering a new phase Computers have evolved over half a century into an essential and indispensable backbone of social information infrastructure. And now, it faces a significant turning point. Although Moore’s Law, which doubles the number of transistors in a chip every two years, has contributed to continuously improving computer performance, we might not be able to expect sustainable transistor shrinking anymore. A promising way to make a breakthrough in solving such a critical issue is to exploit emerging devices, such as non-volatile memories, superconductor device ..read more

Quantum chemistry has been an important benchmark application for emerging quantum computers.  In this article, we will revisit the big-picture motivation for this application and how the iterative nature of the algorithm presents unique challenges and opportunities to improve quality of results on noisy quantum machines. Drug discovery: importance and challenges The COVID19 pandemic has showcased the need for accelerated scientific innovation in the field of medicine, placing an impetus on vastly improving our ability to develop novel effective drugs to combat diseases. Drug discovery i ..read more

Despite quantum computing (QC) being an emerging technology, it is critical to consider new emerging technologies for this paradigm. Current machines, constructed from superconducting transmons or trapped ions, have demonstrated impressive success recently but it is unclear what the eventual winning technologies will be. Most available systems have struggled to scale beyond their prototypes while simultaneously suppressing gate errors and increasing qubit coherence times. This limits the types of programs which can execute effectively.  One approach to push the limits of current devices ..read more

In the three years since our first quantum computing Sigarch blog post, there have been considerable disruptive advancements across the quantum computing stack, coupled with widespread increase in enthusiasm across the classical community. On the technological advancement front, we are poised to reach over 1000 qubit superconducting quantum machines by 2023, multiple quantum technologies are making promising progress, real-world chemical reactions are being efficiently simulated, multiple vendors are providing quantum machine access in the cloud, and new startups are on the horizon. These rec ..read more

Recent progress in quantum computer (QC) systems has been impressive — state-of-the-art devices offer increasing memory size (qubit count) and reliability (decoherence time). A most recent example is from IBM’s announcement on their six new superconducting QC devices with record computational power (of quantum volume 32). To realize that power, much attention needs to be paid in the quantum compiling process, if we want the qubits to perform well – e.g., to compute with high success probability and low resource cost. As such, it is not uncommon that we re-think about the architectural design ..read more

Much of the recent explosion in interest in quantum computing has been driven by the arrival of the “Near-term Intermediate Scale Quantum” era (abbreviated “NISQ”), in which several experimental groups in academic and industrial labs are now able to implement quantum computers on the scale of around 50 qubits.  These systems are imperfect – they are too small and too noisy to run well-known quantum algorithms such as Shor’s or Grover’s algorithm.  Indeed, the major challenge in the NISQ era is algorithmic – we need to understand the power and potential applications of these near-term quantum ..read more

Continuing with our thread on looking past abstractions in quantum computing, guest bloggers Yunong Shi from EPiQC and Christopher Chamberland and Andrew Cross from IBM examine how to make qubits fault tolerant by exploiting more of the physical state space available in quantum circuits. Qubits are the most basic elements of quantum computing, just like classical bits for classical computers. However, there are two major differences between the two. First, it is well known that qubits, inherently, can be in a superposition of logical 0 or 1 states as opposed to be in just one of them. Second ..read more

Practical quantum computation may be achievable in the next few years, but applications will need to be error tolerant and make the best use of a relatively small number of quantum bits and operations.   Compilation tools will play a critical role in achieving these goals, but they will have to break traditional abstractions and be customized for machine and device characteristics in a manner never before seen in classical computing.  Here are three examples along these lines: First, compilers can target not only a specific program input and machine size, but the condition of each qubit and li ..read more