Architectures and Applications for Scalable Quantum Information Systems

As quantum computing moves closer to reality the need forbasic architectural studies becomes more pressing. Quan-tum wires, which transport quantum data, will be a fun-damental component in all anticipated silicon quantum ar-chitectures. In this paper, we introduce a quantum wire ar-chitecture based upon quantum teleportation. We comparethis teleportation channel with the traditional approach totransporting quantum data, which we refer to as the swap-ping channel. We characterize the latency and bandwidthof these two alternatives in a device-independent way anddescribe how the advanced architecture of the teleporta-tion channel overcomes a basic limit to the maximum com-munication distance of the swapping channel. In addition,we discover a fundamental tension between the scale ofquantum effects and the scale of the classical logic neededto control them. This “pitch-matching” problem imposesconstraints on minimum wire lengths and wire intersec-tions, which in turn imply a sparsely connected architec-ture of coarse-grained quantum computational elements.This is in direct contrast to the “sea of gates” architecturespresently assumed by most quantum computing studies.