On the realistic worst case analysis of quantum arithmetic circuits

Abstract: We provide evidence that commonly held intuitions when designing quantum circuits can be misleading. In particular we show that: a) reducing the T-count can increase the total depth; b) it may be beneficial to trade CNOTs for measurements in NISQ circuits; c) measurement-based uncomputation of relative phase Toffoli ancillae can make up to 30\% of a circuit's depth; d) area and volume cost metrics can misreport the resource analysis. Our findings assume that qubits are and will remain a very scarce resource. The results are applicable for both NISQ and QECC protected circuits. Our method uses multiple ways of decomposing Toffoli gates into Clifford+T gates. We illustrate our method on addition and multiplication circuits using ripple-carry. As a byproduct result we show systematically that for a practically significant range of circuit widths, ripple-carry addition circuits are more resource efficient than the carry-lookahead addition ones. The methods and circuits were implemented in the open-source QUANTIFY software.