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In the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) Era, Quantum Computing faces significant challenges due to noise, which severely restricts the application of computing complex algorithms. Superconducting quantum chips, one of the pioneer quantum computation technologies, introduce additional noise when moving qubits to adjacent locations for operation on designated two-qubit gates. The current compilers rely on decision models that either count the swap gates or multiply the gate errors when choosing swap paths at the routing stage. Our research has unveiled the overlooked situations for error propagations through the circuit, leading to accumulations that may affect the final output. In this paper, we propose Error Propagation-Aware Routing (EPAR), designed to enhance the compilation performance by considering accumulated errors in routing. EPAR’s effectiveness is validated through benchmarks on a 27-qubit machine and two simulated systems with different topologies. The results indicate an average success rate improvement of 10% on both real and simulated heavy hex lattice topologies, along with a 16% enhancement in a mesh topology simulation. These findings underscore the potential of EPAR to advance quantum computing in the NISQ era substantially. 

Quantum computers in the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era face two major limitations - size and error vulnerability. Although quantum error correction (QEC) methods exist, they are not applicable at the current size of computers, requiring thousands of qubits, while NISQ systems have nearly one hundred at most. One common approach to improve reliability is to adjust the compilation process to create a more reliable final circuit, where the two most critical compilation decisions are the qubit allocation and qubit routing problems. We focus on solving the qubit allocation problem and identifying initial layouts that result in a reduction of error. To identify these layouts, we combine reinforcement learning with a graph neural network (GNN)-based Q-network to process the mesh topology of the quantum computer, known as the backend, and make mapping decisions, creating a Graph Neural Network Assisted Quantum Compilation (GNAQC) strategy. We train the architecture using a set of four backends and six circuits and find that GNAQC improves output fidelity by roughly 12.7% over pre-existing allocation methods.