In recent years, neutral atom quantum computers (NAQCs) have attracted a lot of attention, primarily due to their long coherence times and good scalability. One of their main drawbacks is their comparatively time-consuming control overhead, with one of the main contributing procedures being the detection of individual atoms and measurement of their states, each occurring at least once per compute cycle and requiring fluorescence imaging and subsequent image analysis. To reduce the required time budget, we propose a highly-parallel atom-detection accelerator for tweezer-based NAQCs. Building on an existing solution, our design combines algorithm-level optimization with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation to maximize parallelism and reduce the run time of the image analysis process. Our design can analyze a 256$\times$256-pixel image representing a 10$\times$10 atom array in just 115 $μ$s on a Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGA. Compared to the original CPU baseline and our optimized CPU version, we achieve about 34.9$\times$ and 6.3$\times$ speedup of the reconstruction time, respectively. Moreover, this work also contributes to the ongoing efforts toward fully integrated FPGA-based control systems for NAQCs.

翻译：近年来，中性原子量子计算机（NAQC）因其较长的相干时间和良好的可扩展性而备受关注。其主要缺点之一是相对耗时的控制开销，其中一个关键环节是对单个原子的探测及其量子态的测量，每个计算周期至少需执行一次，且需要荧光成像及后续的图像分析。为减少所需时间开销，我们提出了一种面向光镊基NAQC的高度并行原子探测加速器。基于现有解决方案，本设计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。我们的设计可在Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGA上仅用115微秒完成对代表10×10原子阵列的256×256像素图像的分析。相较于原始CPU基准方案及我们优化的CPU版本，重建时间分别实现了约34.9倍和6.3倍的加速。此外，本研究亦为构建完全基于FPGA的NAQC集成控制系统提供了技术积累。