Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQCs) are among the most promising computational platforms for quantum computing. Controlling and measuring individual atoms and their states, which often requires multiple imaging and image-analysis procedures, is typically the most time-consuming task during computation and contributes significantly to overall cycle times. To resolve this challenge, we propose a highly-parallel atom-detection accelerator for tweezer-based NAQCs. Our design builds on an existing state-reconstruction method and combines an algorithm-level optimization with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation to maximize parallelism and reduce the run time of the image-analysis process. We identify and overcome several challenges for an FPGA implementation, such as introducing a prefetching mechanism to improve scalability and customizing bus transfers to support large bandwidths. Tested on a Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGA, our design can analyze a 256x256-pixel fluorescence image in just 115mus, achieving 34.9x and 6.3x speedups over the original and optimized CPU baseline, respectively. Moreover, our accelerator can maintain consistent resource utilization across various atom array sizes, contributing to the ongoing efforts toward scalable and fully integrated FPGA-based control systems for NAQCs.

翻译：中性原子量子计算机（NAQCs）是量子计算领域最有前景的计算平台之一。控制和测量单个原子及其状态通常需要多次成像和图像分析流程，这往往是计算过程中最耗时的任务，并在很大程度上决定了整体循环时间。为解决这一挑战，我们提出了一种用于基于镊子的NAQCs的高并行度原子检测加速器。我们的设计基于现有状态重建方法，结合算法级优化与现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）实现，以最大化并行性并缩短图像分析过程的运行时间。我们识别并克服了FPGA实现中的若干挑战，例如引入预取机制以提升可扩展性，以及定制总线传输以支持高带宽需求。在Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGA上测试表明，我们的设计仅需115微秒即可分析一幅256x256像素的荧光图像，相较于原始CPU基线和优化后的CPU基线分别实现了34.9倍和6.3倍的加速。此外，我们的加速器能在不同原子阵列规模下保持一致的资源利用率，这为研发面向NAQCs的可扩展全集成FPGA控制系统提供了持续助力。