Layout Synthesis for Quantum Circuits Considering Toffoli Gate Decomposition

State-of-the-art studies on quantum layout synthesis have proposed various approaches based on the assumption that the input circuit is only composed of single-qubit and two-qubit gates. This assumption greatly simplifies the layout synthesis problem, and thus they only require ensuring that all controlled-NOT (CNOT) gates satisfy the hardware constraints imposed by a given coupling graph. However, during the design of quantum circuits, multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gates are usually used to better characterize the function of the circuits. Directly decomposing them into single and two-qubit gates with a fixed routine ignores the flexibility and optimization opportunity provided by various decomposition (i.e., logic synthesis) possibilities and thus suffers from sub-optimal results. This article proposes a co-optimization approach for quantum logic and layout synthesis. The MCT gates are first decomposed into Toffoli gates, and an efficient qubit mapping checking process is proposed to optimally solve the SWAP-free layout synthesis problem by automatically determining the decomposition result of each Toffoli gate. If a SWAP-free result cannot be found, the proposed algorithm flow is then used to obtain a solution that minimizes the total cost that simultaneously counts the cost caused by the different decomposition methods for Toffoli gates and the cost induced by SWAP gates. Compared with a state-of-the-art method, the proposed approach reduces the number of additional CNOT gates by 16% with around 25X runtime speedup for the cases with SWAP-free solutions, which cannot be obtained without the co-optimization approach.