Quantum Operation Pipelining in the Quantinuum Helios Processor

While quantum processor units (QPUs) continue to make steady progress towards practical applications and truly fault-tolerant operation, significant advances are still needed for these devices to reach their full potential. Current QPUs face practical challenges scaling the control signals and operational times toward utility scale devices. Transport-based quantum processor architectures, such as the trapped-ion quantum charge coupled device (QCCD), can take advantage of operational "pipelining" as a strategy for reducing the resource requirements for scaling to larger processor sizes, without suffering performance penalties. In this presentation, we describe how the latest QPU from Quantinuum, Helios, uses operational pipelining to achieve state-of-the-art system performance.