Hardware emulation of Quantum Fourier Transform

The Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) has an important role in some of the most interesting and useful quantum algorithms, such as those for period finding, order finding, phase estimation and factoring. Most of the research carried out on the QFT has been developed using software simulators, however these do not emulate efficiently the quantum parallelism present in the quantum algorithms. Addressing this problem, this paper presents the hardware design of an emulator for computing the QFT using FPGAs. This emulator was designed considering a modular philosophy and it is expected to be a powerful tool to evaluate quantum algorithms that include a many-qubit QFT.