What are standard/most popular data formats to represent quantum circuits including hardware specifications?

On an abstract level one draws a circuit diagram with wires and gates. Different software frameworks like qiskit, circ etc. probably have different ways to represent these circuits.

My first question is if there is now a single standard (or highly compatible with others) format for representing "textbook" quantum circuits?

If we are to run the circuit on an actual hardware we need to get much more specific about the abstract circuit representation. We need to tailor it to the native gates of the hardware, qubit connectivity, physical properties (time to perform gates, error rates etc.). This is called transpilation.

The second question is if there is any standard extended format for quantum circuits that would take into account the hardware data. Or perhaps there is a clever way to separate device specification from the abstract description of a circuit?

• "perhaps there is a clever way to separate device specification from the abstract description of a circuit" - that would be role played by transpilation, no? – forky40 May 29 at 5:13

1 Answer

The short answer to your first question is no, there is no "single standard" of representing circuits in terms of text/language. The closest to a "single standard" of representing circuits visually is the qiskit and cirq draw functions which produce very similar results that are basically standard in format .

Due to the fact that no quantum hardware description language is in common usage (to my knowledge) there is no way to simply and especially not universally take into account hardware information.

For your problem try using qasm? It is the only language (again, to my knowledge) designed for quantum hardware representation.