Theoretical Analysis of the Efficient-Memory Matrix Storage Method for Quantum Emulation Accelerators with Gate Fusion on FPGAs

Abstract

Quantum emulators play an important role in the development and testing of quantum algorithms, especially given the limitations of the current FTQC era. Developing high-speed, memory-optimized quantum emulators is a growing research trend, with gate fusion being a promising technique. However, existing gate fusion implementations often struggle to efficiently support large-scale quantum systems with a high number of qubits due to a lack of optimizations for the exponential growth in memory requirements. Therefore, this study proposes the EMMS (Efficient-Memory Matrix Storage) method for storing quantum operators and states, along with an EMMS-based Quantum Emulator Accelerator (QEA) architecture that incorporates multiple processing elements (PEs) to accelerate tensor product and matrix multiplication computations in quantum emulation with gate fusion. The theoretical analysis of the QEA on the Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA, using varying numbers of PEs and different depths of unitary and local data memory, reveals a linear increase in memory depth with the number of qubits. This scaling highlights the potential of the EMMS-based QEA to accommodate larger quantum circuits, providing insights into selecting appropriate memory sizes and FPGA devices. Furthermore, the estimated performance of the QEA with PE counts ranging from $2^2$ to $2^5$ on the Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA demonstrates that increasing the number of PEs significantly reduces the computation cycle count for circuits with fewer than 18 qubits, making it significantly faster than previous works.