A Control Line Multiplexing Framework for Scalable Quantum Computing

Abstract

Universal fault-tolerant superconducting quantum computers are expected to require millions of physical qubits; yet extending the prevailing dedicated-control-line paradigm to this scale would exceed the wiring density and cooling-power budget of dilution refrigerators. Microwave frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) revolutionized classical communications by enabling many independent channels to share common transmission infrastructure. Translating this principle to superconducting quantum control, however, requires an all-microwave architecture and experimental validation of frequency-multiplexed gate control. Recent work in quantum error correction has demonstrated microwave-based readout, single-qubit gates and leakage suppression, whereas two-qubit gates remain predominantly driven by unipolar pulses and thus constitute the missing element of an all-microwave architecture. Here, we propose a periodically extensible hybrid multiplexing framework in which all gate operations are frequency-division multiplexed using polychromatic microwave pulses and band-pass filters, thereby reducing the required control-line count by one to two orders of magnitude. In a 1:4 demonstration, we achieve average errors of $(6.4\pm0.2)\times10^{-3}$ for parallel FDM CZ gates and $(10.6\pm0.2)\times10^{-4}$ for parallel FDM $XY(π/2)$ gates, without statistically significant multiplexing-induced degradation. Together with on-chip DC sources, this FDM-based gate-control scheme completes the last missing module in a scalable multiplexed-control architecture toward universal fault-tolerant quantum computing.