arXiv subjects

Javier Valls

Publications and source records attributed to Javier Valls.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Diversity Methods for Improving Convergence and Accuracy of Quantum Error Correction Decoders Through Hardware Emulation

As quantum computing moves toward fault-tolerant architectures, quantum error correction (QEC) decoder performance is increasingly critical for scalability. Understanding the impact of transitioning from floating-point software to finite-precision hardware is essential, as hardware decoder performance affects code distance, qubit requirements, and connectivity between quantum and classical control units. This paper introduces a hardware emulator to evaluate QEC decoders using real hardware instead of software models. The emulator can explore $10^{13}$ different error patterns in 20 days with a single FPGA device running at 150 MHz, guaranteeing the decoder's performance at logical rates of $10^{-12}$, the requirement for most quantum algorithms. In contrast, an optimized C++ software on an Intel Core i9 with 128 GB RAM would take over a year to achieve similar results. The emulator also enables the storage of uncorrectable error patterns that generate logical errors, allowing for offline analysis and the design of new decoders. Using results from the emulator, we propose a method that combines several belief propagation (BP) decoders with different quantization levels, which we define as a diversity-based decoder. Individually, these decoders may show subpar error correction, but together they outperform the floating-point version of BP for quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes like hypergraph or lifted product. Preliminary results with circuit-level noise and bivariate bicycle codes suggest that hardware insights can also improve software. Our diversity-based proposal achieves a similar logical error rate as the well-known approach, BP with ordered statistics (BP+OSD) decoding, with average speed improvements ranging from 30% to 80%, and 10% to 120% in worst-case scenarios, while reducing post-processing algorithm activation from 47% to 96.93%, maintaining the same accuracy.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Check-Agnosia based Post-Processor for Message-Passing Decoding of Quantum LDPC Codes

The inherent degeneracy of quantum low-density parity-check codes poses a challenge to their decoding, as it significantly degrades the error-correction performance of classical message-passing decoders. To improve their performance, a post-processing algorithm is usually employed. To narrow the gap between algorithmic solutions and hardware limitations, we introduce a new post-processing algorithm with a hardware-friendly orientation, providing error correction performance competitive to the state-of-the-art techniques. The proposed post-processing, referred to as check-agnosia, is inspired by stabilizer-inactivation, while considerably reducing the required hardware resources, and providing enough flexibility to allow different message-passing schedules and hardware architectures. We carry out a detailed analysis for a set of Pareto architectures with different tradeoffs between latency and power consumption, derived from the results of implemented designs on an FPGA board. We show that latency values close to one microsecond can be obtained on the FPGA board, and provide evidence that much lower latency values can be obtained for ASIC implementations. In the process, we also demonstrate the practical implications of the recently introduced t-covering layers and random-order layered scheduling.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Layered Decoding of Quantum LDPC Codes

We address the problem of performing message-passing-based decoding of quantum LDPC codes under hardware latency limitations. We propose a novel way to do layered decoding that suits quantum constraints and outperforms flooded scheduling, the usual scheduling on parallel architectures. A generic construction is given to construct layers of hypergraph product codes. In the process, we introduce two new notions, t-covering layers which is a generalization of the usual layer decomposition, and a new scheduling called random order scheduling. Numerical simulations show that the random ordering is of independent interest as it helps relieve the high error floor typical of message-passing decoders on quantum codes for both layered and serial decoding without the need for post-processing.

quant-ph↗