Automatic Test Pattern Generation for Robust Quantum Circuit Testing

Abstract

Quantum circuit testing is essential for detecting potential faults in realistic quantum devices, while the testing process itself also suffers from the inexactness and unreliability of quantum operations. This paper alleviates the issue by proposing a novel framework of automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) for the robust quantum circuit testing. We introduce the stabilizer projector decomposition (SPD) for representing the quantum test pattern, and construct the test application using classical randomness and Clifford-only circuits, which are rather robust and efficient as shown in the fault-tolerant quantum computation. However, it is generally hard to generate SPDs due to the super-exponentially growing number of the stabilizer projectors. To circumvent this difficulty, we develop an SPD generation algorithm, as well as several acceleration techniques which can exploit both locality and sparsity in generating SPDs. Furthermore, we provide in-depth analyses for the proposed algorithms, both theoretically and empirically. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency, we implement and evaluate our algorithms on several commonly used benchmark circuits, such as Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), Quantum Volume (QV) and Bernstein-Vazirani (BV) in IBM Qiskit. For example, test patterns are automatically generated by our algorithm for a 10qubit QFT circuit, and then a fault is detected by simulating the test application with detection accuracy higher than 91%.