A New Heuristic for $N$ -Dimensional Nearest Neighbor Realization of a Quantum Circuit

Abstract

One of the main challenges in quantum computing is to ensure error-free operation of the basic quantum gates. There are various implementation technologies of quantum gates for which the distance between interacting qubits must be kept within a limit for reliable operation. This leads to the so-called requirement of neighborhood arrangements of the interacting qubits, often referred to as nearest neighbor (NN) constraint. This is typically achieved by inserting SWAP gates in the quantum circuits, where a SWAP gate between two qubits exchanges their states. Minimizing the number of SWAP gates to provide NN compliance is an important problem to solve. A number of approaches have been proposed in this regard, based on local and global ordering techniques. In this paper, a generalized approach for combined local and global ordering of qubits have been proposed that is based on an improved heuristic for cost estimation and is also scalable. The approach can be extended to ${N}$ -dimensional arrangement of qubits, for any arbitrary values of ${N}$ . Practical constraints, however, restrict the maximum value of ${N}$ to 3. Extensive experiments on benchmark functions have been carried out to evaluate the performance in terms of SWAP gate requirements. 3-D organization of qubits shows average reductions of 6.7% and 37.4%, respectively, in the number of SWAP gates over 2-D and 1-D organizations. Also compared to the best 2-D and 1-D results reported in the literature, on the average 8.7% and 8.4% reductions, respectively, are observed.