Locality-aware Qubit Routing for the Grid Architecture

Due to the short decohorence time of qubits available in the NISQ-era, it is essential to pack (minimize the size and or the depth of) a logical quantum circuit as efficiently as possible given a sparsely coupled physical architecture. In this work we introduce a locality-aware qubit routing algorithm based on a graph theoretic framework. Our algorithm is designed for the grid and certain 'grid-like' architectures. We experimentally show the competitiveness of algorithm by comparing it against the approximate token swapping algorithm, which is used as a primitive in many state-of-the-art quantum transpilers. Our algorithm produces circuits of comparable depth (better on random permutations) while being an order of magnitude faster than a typical implementation of the approximate token swapping algorithm.