Designing superconducting quantum circuits can be slow. In the past, every group or company build their own ad-hoc tuning loop, and until now there’s been no open tool to automate arbitrary circuit design optimizations.

Our new paper (by Axel Martin Eriksson, Lukas Splitthoff, Harsh Vardhan Upadhyay, Pietro Campana, Oscar Lundström, Niranjan Pittan Narendiran, Kunal Helambe, Linus Andersson, Prof. Simone Gasparinetti) in Quantum Science and Technology introduces a physics-guided optimization framework, along with QDesignOptimizer, a complete open-source implementation.

The core method, ANMod, embeds known physics into approximate nonlinear relations to generate direct design updates; bypassing standard model-building and computed gradients.

This reduces the computational cost of re-simulation, making precise parameter targeting practical. In our tests, this delivered:

  1. Qubit–resonator systems: Optimized in hours rather than days.
  2. Five-mode two-qubit–coupler circuits: Optimized in ~1 day rather than a week.
  3. A 3,000-parameter nonlinear system: Optimized in a few iterations, demonstrating applicability beyond superconducting circuits.
  4. QDesignOptimizer is modular: Integrates directly with HFSS, pyEPR, and Quantum-Metal.