Ruoyu Yan

QuCtrl-BELL: A Compiler-Driven Sub-Microsecond Feedback Control Stack for Scalable Trapped-Ion Quantum Experiments

Junpeng She [1], Ruoyu Yan [1], Zhizhen Qin [3], Zhanyu Li [1], Zhongtao Shen [3], Zichao Zhou [1,2], Binxiang Qi [1], Luming Duan [1,2]

Abstract

As trapped-ion quantum computing scales to larger qubit registers and more complex control protocols, classical control systems face a fundamental tradeoff: sub-microsecond board-level feedback requires tight hardware coupling, whereas maintainability and extensibility require clean, modular software abstractions. This paper presents QuCtrl-BELL (Bell), a compiler-driven software stack for trapped-ion quantum control. The design resolves this tradeoff by decoupling control flow -- including loops, branches, and synchronization -- from hardware state data. A Python-embedded domain-specific language (DSL) is lowered through a six-stage transpilation pipeline covering control flow graph (CFG) construction, static single-assignment (SSA) conversion, liveness analysis, and graph-coloring register allocation. The compiler generates deterministic distributed board-level programs and compact step-table data. A cross-board synchronization protocol supports feedback loops with latency below 700~ns without host intervention. Bell is deployed and evaluated on the QuCtrl-BELL platform (RISC-V + PXIe), demonstrating that a compiler-based infrastructure can provide programmability, deterministic timing, and modularity for scalable trapped-ion quantum control.