Development of FPGA Based Instrumentation for Readout and Control of Superconducting Qubits

Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize relevant application areas, such as optimization, cryptography, and machine learning, addressing problems that are beyond the reach of classical computing. However, despite rapid progress, significant challenges remain, particularly in qubit control infrastructures. Existing commercial solutions are highly customized, prohibitively expensive, tightly coupled to specific quantum processing units (QPUs), and lack portability, scalability, and flexibility. In recent years however, open- source projects have emerged that leverage preexisting commercial products to provide low-cost solutions. This thesis presents the design of an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based instrumentation that, similarly to other open-source solutions, exploits commercially available Xilinx RFSoCs, originally developed for 5G communication, to generate and acquire radio frequency modulated electrical pulses needed for the control and readout of the state of superconducting qubits. By leveraging the Analog-to-Digital and Digital-to-Analog converters present on the FPGA, direct digital control over all signals is achieved, which allows for precise waveform generation and modulation, and for repeatable signal acquisition; core design goals alongside speed and scalability. The proposed firmware includes subsystems designed to generate and acquire analog signals at specific times during the execution of a quantum experiment, in a fast, reliable, repeatable and predictable fashion. These subsystems have been designed with consolidated digital signal processing techniques, specifically tailored to quantum applications; with improvements in precision, resource utilization and speed with respect to other open-source solutions. A supporting, low-level software stack was created to aid in experiment definition and execution, based on the PYNQ (Python productivity for Adaptive Computing platforms) framework. Finally, system performance was benchmarked on real qubits by executing a subset of calibration experiments. The results are promising, demonstrating comparable results to other open-source solutions while achieving a considerable speed-up in run time.