PACOX: A FPGA-based Pauli Composer Accelerator for Pauli String Computation

Abstract

Pauli strings are a fundamental computational primitive in hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. However, classical computation of Pauli strings suffers from exponential complexity and quickly becomes a performance bottleneck as the number of qubits increases. To address this challenge, this paper proposes the Pauli Composer Accelerator (PACOX), the first dedicated FPGA-based accelerator for Pauli string computation. PACOX employs a compact binary encoding with XOR-based index permutation and phase accumulation. Based on this formulation, we design a parallel and pipelined processing element (PE) cluster architecture that efficiently exploits data-level parallelism on FPGA. Experimental results on a Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA show that PACOX operates at 250 MHz with a dynamic power consumption of 0.33 W, using 8,052 LUTs, 10,934 FFs, and 324 BRAMs. For Pauli strings of up to 19 qubits, PACOX consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CPU-based methods in terms of execution speed, while also requiring significantly less memory and achieving a much lower power-delay product. These results demonstrate that PACOX delivers high computational speed with superior energy efficiency for Pauli-based workloads in hybrid quantum-classical systems.