Design Automation for Near-Term and Fault-tolerant Quantum Computing

Abstract: Quantum computing is error-prone and needs error correction. Near-term quantum computing of today does not have enough qubits for incorporating quantum error correction. In this talk, we first present a brief introduction to gate based quantum computing. Then, hardware-independent graph-theoretic algorithms to reduce noise in circuits for Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithms (QAOAs) for combinatorial optimization problems such as MAX-CUT of a given undirected graph. A heuristic method for this problem which respects the target hardware architecture and thus requires additional SWAP gates, is also outlined.

Next, we march on into the future domain of error corrected quantum computing. We delve very briefly into quantum error correcting codes along with the challenges in syndrome decoding for two commonly used quantum error correcting codes, namely surface and heavy hexagonal codes. We propose machine-learning based approaches which utilize certain group-theoretic properties for the sake of time-efficient syndrome decoding.

Bio: Prof. Susmita Sur-Kolay is presently visiting the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego as a Fulbright Academic Excellence Fellow. She retired as a Professor in the Advanced Computing and Microelectronics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute in 2024. She has been a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, University of Bremen, Germany, Princeton University, and Intel Corp., USA. She was a Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research contributions are on design automation for VLSI physical design, hardware security and synthesis of quantum circuits. She is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian National Academy of Engineering, a Senior Member of IEEE. Among other awards, she was the recipient of the President of India Gold Medal and Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kharagpur, International Excellence Fellowship of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Women in Technology Leadership from VLSI Society of India.