Universal quantum control based on parametric modulation in superconducting circuits

As superconducting quantum circuits are scaling up rapidly towards the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, the demand for electronic control equipment has increased significantly. To fully control a quantum chip of N qubits, the common method based on up-conversion technology costs at least 2×N digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and N IQ mixers. The expenses and complicate mixer calibration have become a hinderance for intermediate-scale quantum control. Here we propose a universal control scheme for superconducting circuits, fully based on parametric modulation. To control N qubits on a chip, our scheme only requires N DACs and no IQ mixer, which significantly reduces the expenses. One key idea in the control scheme is to introduce a global pump signal for single-qubit gates. We theoretically explain how the universal gates are constructed using parametric modulation. The fidelity analysis shows that parametric single-qubit (two-qubit) gates in the proposed scheme can achieve low error rates of 10^-4, with a gate time of about 60 ns (100 ns).