Comparison of Superconducting NISQ Architectures

Advances in quantum hardware have begun the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing era. A pressing question is: what architectures are best suited to take advantage of this new regime of quantum machines? We study various superconducting architectures including Google's Sycamore, IBM's Heavy-Hex, Rigetti's Aspen and Ankaa in addition to a proposed architecture we call bus next-nearest neighbor (busNNN). We evaluate these architectures using benchmarks based on the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) which can solve certain quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems. We also study compilation tools that target these architectures, which use either general heuristic or deterministic methods to map circuits onto a target topology defined by an architecture.