Thursday, January 26, 2006

HDLs for Quantum Computers

Hardware description languages (HDLs) are languages for designing electronic circuits. Udrescu et al. published a paper on the topic of HDLs for quantum computing. I haven't had time to sit down and read it in detail yet, but I'm excited by the basic idea.

Of course, existing work on quantum languages often reads like circuit design rather than conventional programming languages, so this isn't the first time someone has worked in this area, but I'm happy to see more people working explicitly on the design of the quantum hardware.

My own assembler currently supports a variety of back ends which programs can be compiled for, but doesn't yet have a description language for architectures. It's on my list of things to do...

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