A layered software architecture for quantum computing design tools

Despite convincing laboratory demonstrations of quantum information processing, it remains difficult to scale because it relies on inherently noisy components. Adequate use of quantum error correction and fault tolerance theoretically should enable much better scaling, but the sheer complexity of the techniques involved limits what is achievable today. The authors propose a layered software architecture consisting of a four-phase computer-aided design flow that assists with such computations by mapping a high-level language source program representing a quantum algorithm onto a quantum device. By weighing different optimization and error-correction procedures at appropriate phases of the design flow, researchers, algorithm designers, and tool builders can trade off performance and accuracy.