A small and interesting architecture for early fault-tolerant quantum computers

Abstract: We present an architecture for early fault-tolerant quantum computers based on the smallest interesting colour code (Earl Campbell, 2016). It realizes a universal logical gate set consisting of single-qubit measurements and preparations in the X and Z bases, single-qubit Hadamard (H) gates, and three-qubit controlled-controlled-Z (CCZ) gates. State teleportations between [4, 2, 2] and [8, 3, 2] error-detecting color codes allow one to make use of the respective transversal H and CCZ gates that these codes possess. As such, minimizing the number of logical quantum teleportation operations, not the number of logical quantum non-Clifford gates, is the relevant optimization goal. To help hardware developers characterize this architecture, we also provide an experimental protocol tailored to testing logical quantum circuits expressed in it.