Mapping quantum circuits on 3D nearest-neighbor architectures

In some quantum technologies, an interaction is only allowed between physically adjacent qubits, hence the nearest-neighbor requirement is needed. In such technologies, quantum gates are limited to operate on adjacent qubits. To make a quantum circuit compliant with the nearest-neighbor requirement, SWAP gates are inserted into the circuit to move the interacting qubits of a gate to be adjacent to each other. The mapping of qubits on the physical environment has an important role on reducing the number of SWAP gates and thus the circuit latency. Focusing on this issue, in this paper, a method is proposed that maps a quantum circuit onto a 3D physical hardware such as a 3D optical lattice. A new methodology for this mapping problem is proposed based on a complex network spectral clustering algorithm and graph theory, which are suitable for very large scale networks. It includes three steps: finding the order of qubit mapping, placing physical qubits, and routing. Simulation results show that the proposed mapping approach not only decreases the average number of SWAP gates by about 37% but also improves the average runtime by about 87% for the 2D architecture compared to PAQCS. Moreover, it reduces the average number of SWAP gates for the 3D architecture by 17.1% compared to the best studies in the literatures.