Open Decoding Platform and Logical Orchestration in a Quantum Control Stack for Real-Time Fault Tolerance

Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is essential to achieve quantum utility. QEC has to be applied in real time, to preserve the logical qubits across non-Clifford gates while the computation is still running. In a fault tolerant computation, the control stack is responsible for the execution of logical operations as well as the corresponding physical operations, while transferring syndrome data to a dedicated classical computational resource for decoding in real time. However, real-time QEC is extremely challenging, as it requires low-latency, high throughput communication between the control stack and decoders. This has led to the vast majority of QEC demonstrations so far to rely on decoding in post-processing.

We introduce an open decoding platform that enables high-throughput interfacing and logical orchestration between decoders and Qblox’ feedback network. Syndrome measurements are aggregated in the control stack with full determinism and low latency. Syndromes can then be streamed to a decoder with an open interface such as the QECi standard, enabling researchers to integrate decoders for a wide variety of QEC codes and classical computational resources. Finally, the Qblox Cluster enables logical orchestration, where not only physical operations are synchronized across multiple modules with sub-nanosecond precision, but also orchestrated at the logical level based on the decoder output.