Compiling SU(4) quantum circuits to IBM QX architectures

The Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology is currently investigated by major players in the field to build the first practically useful quantum computer. IBM QX architectures are the first ones which are already publicly available today. However, in order to use them, the respective quantum circuits have to be compiled for the respectively used target architecture. While first approaches have been proposed for this purpose, they are infeasible for a certain set of SU(4) quantum circuits which have recently been introduced to benchmark corresponding compilers. In this work, we analyze the bottlenecks of existing compilers and provide a dedicated method for compiling this kind of circuits to IBM QX architectures. Our experimental evaluation (using tools provided by IBM) shows that the proposed approach significantly outperforms IBM's own solution regarding fidelity of the compiled circuit as well as runtime. Moreover, the solution proposed in this work has been declared winner of the IBM QISKit Developer Challenge. An implementation of the proposed methodology is publicly available at http://iic.jku.at/eda/research/ibm_qx_mapping.