Versatile and concurrent FPGA-based architecture for practical quantum communication systems

Abstract

This work presents a hardware and software architecture which can be used in those systems that implement practical Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Quantum Random Number Generation (QRNG) schemes. This architecture fully exploits the capability of a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) which comprehends both a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and a dual core CPU unit. By assigning the time-related tasks to the FPGA and the management to the CPU, we built a flexible system with optimized resource sharing on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) evaluation board which includes a SoC. Furthermore, by changing the dataflow direction, the versatile system architecture can be exploited as a QKD transmitter, QKD receiver and QRNG control-acquiring unit. Finally, we exploited the dual core functionality and realized a concurrent stream device to implement a practical QKD transmitter where one core continuously receives fresh data at a sustained rate from an external QRNG source while the other operates with the FPGA to drive the qubits transmission to the QKD receiver. The system was successfully tested on a long-term run proving its stability and security. This demonstration paves the way towards a more secure QKD implementation, with fully unconditional security as the QKD states are entirely generated by a true random process and not by deterministic expansion algorithms. Eventually, this enables the realization of a standalone quantum transmitter, including both the random numbers and the qubits generation.

7 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

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• International time transfer between precise timing facilities secured with a quantum key distribution network
• Scatter-Gather DMA Performance Analysis within an SoC-based Control System for Trapped-Ion Quantum Computing
• Modular source for near-infrared quantum communication
• Low-error encoder for time-bin and decoy states for quantum key distribution
• A time-to-digital converter with steady calibration through single-photon detection
• Power-consumption Backdoor in Quantum Key Distribution
• Deployment-ready quantum key distribution over a classical network infrastructure in Padua
• A Sagnac-based arbitrary time-bin state encoder for quantum communication applications