A Scalable Open-Source QEC System with Sub-Microsecond Decoding-Feedback Latency

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 17 Mar 2026] A Scalable Open-Source QEC System with Sub-Microsecond Decoding-Feedback Latency Junyi Liu, Yi Lee, Yilun Xu, Gang Huang, Xiaodi Wu Quantum error correction (QEC) is essential for realizing large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computation, yet its practical implementation remains a major engineering challenge. In particular, QEC demands precise real-time control of a large number of qubits and low-latency, high-throughput and accurate decoding of error syndromes. While most prior work has focused primarily on decoder design, the overall performance of any QEC system depends critically on all its subsystems including control, communication, and decoding, as well as their integration. To address this challenge, we present an open-source, fully integrated QEC system built on RISC-Q, a generator for RISC-V-based quantum control architectures. Implemented on RFSoC FPGAs, our system prototype integrates real-time qubit control, a scalable distributed multi-board architecture, and the state-of-the-art hardware QEC decoder within a low-latency, high-throughput decoding pipeline, forming a complete hardware platform ready for deployment with superconducting qubits. Experimental evaluation on a three-board prototype based on AMD ZCU216 RFSoCs demonstrates an end-to-end QEC decoding-feedback latency of 446 ns for a distance-3 surface code, including syndrome aggregation, network communication, syndrome decoding, and error distribution. Extrapolating from measured subsystem performance and state-of-the-art decoder benchmarks, the architecture can achieve sub-microsecond decoding-feedback latency up to a distance-21 surface code (\sim881 physical qubits) when scaled to larger hardware configurations. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR) Cite as: arXiv:2603.16203 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2603.16203v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.16203 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Junyi Liu [view email] [v1] Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:30:35 UTC (12,829 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.AR References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)