Investigating Impact of Bit-flip Errors in Control Electronics on Quantum Computation

In this paper, we investigate the impact of bit-flip errors in FPGA memories in control electronics on quantum computing systems. FPGA memories are integral in storing the amplitude and phase information pulse envelopes, which are essential for generating quantum gate pulses. However, these memories can incur faults due to physical and environmental stressors such as electromagnetic interference, power fluctuations, and temperature variations and adversarial fault injections, potentially leading to errors in quantum gate operations. To understand how these faults affect quantum computations, we conducted a series of experiments to introduce bit flips into the amplitude (both real and imaginary components) and phase values of quantum pulses using IBM's simulated quantum environments, FakeValencia, FakeManila, and FakeLima. We compare the sensitivity of floating-point and fixed-point representations to these bit-flip errors. The findings reveal that bit flips in the exponent and initial mantissa bits of the real amplitude in floating- point representation cause substantial deviations in quantum gate operations, with TVD increases as high as 200%. Conversely, fixed-point representation shows reduced sensitivity to bit-flips, offering a more robust alternative for certain applications. These in- sights can guide the selection of data representations to enhance the robustness of quantum computing systems from hardware faults.