Computer-aided design for quantum computation

Abstract

Quantum computation is currently moving from an academic idea to a practical reality. The recent past has seen tremendous progress in the physical implementation of corresponding quantum computers - also involving big players such as IBM, Google, Intel, Rigetti, Microsoft, and Alibaba. These devices promise substantial speedups over conventional computers for applications like quantum chemistry, optimization, machine learning, cryptography, quantum simulation, and systems of linear equations. The Computer-Aided Design and Verification (jointly referred as CAD) community needs to be ready for this revolutionizing new technology. While research on automatic design methods for quantum computers is currently underway, there is still far too little coordination between the CAD community and the quantum computation community. Consequently, many CAD approaches proposed in the past have either addressed the wrong problems or failed to reach the end users. In this summary paper, we provide a glimpse into both sides. To this end, we review and discuss selected accomplishments from the CAD domain as well as open challenges within the quantum domain. These examples showcase the recent state-of-the-art but also outline the remaining work left to be done in both communities.