Tools for Quantum Computing Based on Decision Diagrams

With quantum computers promising advantages even in the near-term NISQ era, there is a lively community that develops software and toolkits for the design of corresponding quantum circuits. Although the underlying problems are different, expertise from the design automation community, which developed sophisticated design solutions for the conventional realm in the past decades, can help here. In this respect, decision diagrams provide a promising foundation for tackling many design tasks such as simulation, synthesis, and verification of quantum circuits. However, users of the corresponding tools often do not have a proper background or an intuition about how these methods based on decision diagrams work and what their strengths and limits are. In this work, we first review the concepts of how decision diagrams can be employed, e.g., for the simulation and verification of quantum circuits. Afterwards, in an effort to make decision diagrams for quantum computing more accessible, we then present a visualization tool for quantum decision diagrams, which allows users to explore the behavior of decision diagrams in the design tasks mentioned above. Finally, we present decision diagram-based tools for simulation and verification of quantum circuits using the methods discussed above as part of the open-source JKQ quantum toolset---a set of tools for quantum computing developed at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz and released under the MIT license. More information about the corresponding tools is available at https://github.com/iic-jku/. By this, we provide an introduction of the concepts and tools for potential users who would like to work with them as well as potential developers aiming to extend them.
Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, to be published in the ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing special issue on software tools for quantum computing