An FPGA-Accelerated Atom Sorting Unit for Neutral Atom Quantum Computers

Neutral atoms have been proven to be a promising physical platform for quantum computing because of their longer coherence time and good scalability. To operate neutral-atom quantum computers, an essential step before computation is to assemble the atoms as a defect-free array. This process is called atom rearrangement or atom sorting, which typically requires a long analysis time on classical computers. To optimize the sorting process, we propose a hardware-friendly sorting algorithm (oriented for FPGA acceleration) to be able to analyze the atom array with four independent quadrants and process each quadrant in parallel. Tested on a Xilinx ZCU216 FPGA, our design can finish the sorting analysis procedure with a 50 <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\times 50$</tex> loaded atoms array with around 1.0 <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mu s$</tex>. Compared to the CPU implementation, we achieved an acceleration of around <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$50\times$</tex> speedup in algorithm analysis time. In addition, the design exhibits good scalability in execution time, making it suitable for large-scale quantum systems.