HiMA: Hierarchical Quantum Microarchitecture for Qubit-Scaling and Quantum Process-Level Parallelism

Abstract: Quantum computing holds immense potential for addressing a myriad of intricate challenges, which is significantly amplified when scaled to thousands of qubits. However, a major challenge lies in developing an efficient and scalable quantum control system. To address this, we propose a novel Hierarchical MicroArchitecture (HiMA) designed to facilitate qubit scaling and exploit quantum process-level parallelism. This microarchitecture is based on three core elements: (i) discrete qubit-level drive and readout, (ii) a process-based hierarchical trigger mechanism, and (iii) multiprocessing with a staggered triggering technique to enable efficient quantum process-level parallelism. We implement HiMA as a control system for a 72-qubit tunable superconducting quantum processing unit, serving a public quantum cloud computing platform, which is capable of expanding to 6144 qubits through three-layer cascading. In our benchmarking tests, HiMA achieves up to a 4.89x speedup under a 5-process parallel configuration. Consequently, to the best of our knowledge, we have achieved the highest CLOPS (Circuit Layer Operations Per Second), reaching up to 43,680, across all publicly available platforms.