QEA: An Accelerator for Quantum Circuit Simulation with Resources Efficiency and Flexibility

The area of quantum circuit simulation has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. However, due to the exponentially increasing computational costs, assessing and validating these models on large datasets poses significant obstacles. Despite plenty of research in quantum simulation, issues such as memory management, system adaptability, and execution efficiency remain unresolved. In this study, we introduce QEA, a state vector-based hardware accelerator that overcomes these difficulties with four key improvements: optimized memory allocation management, open PE, flexible ALU, and simplified CX swapper. To evaluate QEA's capabilities, we implemented and evaluated it on the AMD Alveo U280 board, which uses only 0.534 W of power. Experimental results show that QEA is extremely flexible, supporting a wide range of quantum circuits, has excellent fidelity, making it appropriate for standard quantum emulators, and outperforms powerful CPUs and related works up to 153.16x better in terms of normalized gate speed. This study has considerable potential as a useful approach for quantum emulators in future works.