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Glossary

Quantum glossary

Transpilation

Also: compilation, transpiler

Rewriting a circuit into the native gates and connectivity of a specific device, while optimising it.

It decomposes gates, chooses which physical qubit plays each logical one, inserts SWAPs, and cancels redundancy. The same circuit can transpile to very different gate counts on different devices, which is why device choice matters.

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Related terms

  • Coupling map — The graph of which physical qubits on a device can interact directly with a two-qubit gate.
  • SWAP gate — A two-qubit gate that exchanges the states of two qubits; it costs three CNOTs.
  • Universal gate set — A small set of gates from which any quantum computation can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy.