Timing and resource-aware mapping of quantum circuits to superconducting processors

Quantum algorithms need to be compiled to respect the constraints imposed by quantum processors, which is known as the mapping problem. The mapping procedure will result in an increase of the number of gates and of the circuit latency, decreasing the algorithm's success rate. It is crucial to minimize mapping overhead, especially for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) processors that have relatively short qubit coherence times and high gate error rates. Most of prior mapping algorithms have only considered constraints such as the primitive gate set and qubit connectivity, but the actual gate duration and the restrictions imposed by the use of shared classical control electronics have not been taken into account. In this paper, we present a timing and resource-aware mapper called Qmap to make quantum circuits executable on a scalable superconducting processor named Surface-17 with the objective of achieving the shortest circuit latency. In particular, we propose an approach to formulate the classical control restrictions as resource constraints in a conventional list scheduler with polynomial complexity. Furthermore, we implement a routing heuristic to cope with the connectivity limitation. This router finds a set of movement operations that minimally extends circuit latency. To analyze the mapping overhead and evaluate the performance of different mappers, we map 56 quantum benchmarks onto Surface-17. Compared to a prior mapping strategy that minimizes the number of operations, Qmap can reduce the latency overhead up to 47.3% and operation overhead up to 28.6%, respectively.