Adapting 5G-telecom hardware for the control of quantum computers*

An important figure of merit for scalable quantum computing is the cost per channel per unit bandwidth of its control electronics. Fortunately, 5G telecom is a major market force pushing this cost down. These fields share in fact many technical requirements: multiple phase-coherent and wide-band channels for output and input; low noise and low distortion with low cross-talk between channels; easy to reconfigure and field-programmable, with high-speed logic for feedback and feed-forward control.

These requirements have driven the development of a new series of radio-frequency system-on-a-chip (RFSoC) devices from Xilinx. Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC devices allows for direct digital synthesis and sampling of signals up to 6 GHz, without analog mixers. With 16 channels of input and output coupled to one very large FPGA, these circuits allow for multiple, synchronous signal generation and readout at a cost well below $1.00 / channel / MHz.

We have adapted a RFSoC platform for the characterization and control of superconducting qubit circuits. We describe the hardware modifications and firmware extensions needed for this adaptation. We demonstrate the use of our platform in characterizing a superconducting qubit.