Quantum Hardware Design and Analysis Workshop

@ IEEE Quantum Week 2021

Registration available at https://qce.quantum.ieee.org/registration/.

10:45-16:45 Mountain Time (MDT), Friday, Oct 22, 2021

Abstract

How do we streamline the design and analysis of innovative superconducting quantum processors? The need for the scaling of and the growing diversity of circuit architectures makes this a question of central importance. Good solutions will need to smoothly orchestrate expertise and tools from traditionally disparate worlds. The microwave circuitry composing superconducting quantum chips can be readily simulated in classical software, but additional quantum analysis is required in order to find the Hamiltonian used to fully model the dynamics of the system, a necessary step to properly tune the quantum device. For large systems, this can be a very time consuming and complex process, requiring numerous iterations of computationally large simulations and slow feedback loops. The goal of this workshop is to bring together the diverse collection of experts in academia, industry and government, from EDA specialists to microwave engineers to quantum physicists, required to answer that question. They will discuss the current state of the field, such as established best practices and the ecosystem of open-source and commercial software. Vendors will showcase their proposed solutions for improved design and simulation, discussing where advancements are still necessary. Finally, state-of-the-art open-source endeavors that have been proposed will be presented, focusing on the community driven development and where such tools have been successful. The field has a growing need to establish software tools to enable the fast and easy design and analysis of quantum chips; this workshop aims to provide a forum for the community to do so.

Agenda

10:45 - 12:15 Academic Session

Time	Speaker	Topic
10:45	Nick Bronn	Introduction
10:50	David DiVincenzo Director of the Institute of Theoretical Nanoelectronics at Forschungszentrum Jülich & co-director JARA Institute for Quantum Information	"History of Superconducting Qubits"
		When the "qubit" arrived on the intellectual scene, circa 1995, the pioneering work to see quantum effects in superconducting circuits had already been done. But the qubit paradigm gave a tremendous boost to this field. While old samples immediately came out of the drawer for looking more at their quantum coherence, it was clear that a radical and painful redo of the experimental approach was needed to really step positively forward towards Josephson quantum computing. I will touch on the major steps of this redo, about ten years in the making. For us at IBM at the time, it was a bruising but invigorating experience.
11:35	Jonas Bylander Associate Professor @ Chalmers University of Technology	TBD
		Abstract:
11:55	Andreas Wallraff Full Professor in Physics @ ETH Zürich	TBD
		Abstract:

1:00 - 2:30 Commercial Software Session

Time	Speaker	Topic
1:00	Brian Rautio VP Operations @ Sonnet Software	"EM Simulation—when does it break?"
		As a large, multi-decade industry full of strong and reliable products, it’s easy to trust the results of your EM simulator. However, at Sonnet, we can understand that simulation is inherently going to be wrong to some degree. The question we always need to ask is, “How wrong is my answer?” It’s a spectrum and the error margins may be insignificant to alarming, and the types of things we do and the way we drive our simulators can have a significant impact on that. Pushing the limit of physics means that we may be pushing the limits of our EM simulation as well, and this talk will help navigate that concept with awareness.
1:15	Kostas Nikellis Director of R&D @ Ansys Inc.	TBD
		Abstract:
1:30	Chris Mueth Business Development, Marketing, and Technical Specialist @ Keysight Technologies	TBD
		Abstract:
1:45	Davi Correia Sr. Principal Application Engineer @ Cadence Design Systems	TBD
		Abstract:
2:00	Moderator John P. DeVale Group Supervisor @ The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory	Panel Discussion

3:15 - 4:45 Open-source Software Session

Time	Speaker	Topic
3:15	Jens Koch Associate Professor @ Northwestern University	"scqubits: a Python package for superconducting qubits"
		Abstract:
3:30	Marco Facchini Senior Development Engineer @ IBM	Qiskit Metal
		Abstract:
3:45	Johannes Heinsoo Senior Quantum Engnieer @ IQM	KQCircuits
		Abstract:
4:00	Boxi Li PhD Candidate @ Forschungszentrum Jülich	QuTiP
		Simulating quantum dynamics is of essential importance in the design and engineering of various components in quantum hardware. The Quantum Toolbox in Python (QuTiP), one of the earliest open-source software packages in simulating quantum dynamics, has been widely used in developing qubits, quantum gates and measurement protocols. The package is now being developed under a worldwide collaboration and has grown rapidly in the last few years. In this talk, I will briefly present the basic functionality of the package and introduce a few new features that offer more flexibility in hardware simulation. In particular, in the next major version of QuTiP, qutip-v5, one will be able to define custom data types and ODE solvers as a plug-in package. Moreover, in the new sub-package, qutip-qip, we provide tools for circuit simulation at the level of time evolution, allowing studying various kinds of noise in the numerical simulation.
4:15	Moderator Yaniv Rosen Quantum Physicist @ Lawrence Livermore National Lab	Panel Discussion

Organizers

Thomas G. McConkey: IBM Quantum, USA

Zlatko Minev: IBM Quantum, USA

Nicholas Bronn: IBM Quantum, USA