FPGA-accelerated Quantum Transport Measurements

Quantum transport measurements of semiconductor quantum dots are essential for the control and operation of semiconductor spin quantum bits. Typical measurement setups use a host computer for digital signal processing, thereby limiting acquisition speed and hindering fast time-resolved measurements needed to capture quantum dot dynamics. To this end, we used a digitizer with an integrated FPGA for acquiring and processing measurements of the electrical transport through a semiconductor quantum dot. We designed a custom signal processing architecture that supports time-resolved data acquisition at sampling rates between 1.5 kHz and 100 MHz, as opposed to a few hundred mHz achievable in the original measurement setup. This enabled us to detect single-electron quantum tunneling events. The proposed architecture was further used to control and process the acquisition of real-time charge-stability diagrams at rates up to several tens of Hz. This results in measurements between 20.1x and 160.7x faster and with 2.5x and 7.5x higher resolution than using the original measurement setup. This work demonstrates the ability of FPGA technology to advance quantum transport experiments by enabling fast and time-resolved quantum transport measurements, thus overcoming existing experimental bottlenecks in measurement speed and bandwidth.