Before the advent of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) in the mid-1970s, integrated circuits were meticulously crafted by hand, relying on manual layout processes, which significantly limited the system's ability to scale up for scientific applications. History repeats itself: today’s quantum computing is in its nascent stage, where quantum circuit designs are carried out manually in an ad-hoc fashion, presenting a challenge to leverage the powerful quantum computers practically for applications. In response to this challenge, it is imperative for the development of a quantum analog to EDA --- Quantum Design Automation (QDA), such that it can provide a systematic and automated framework for the design of quantum circuits, marking a crucial step towards overcoming the current impediments in the path to practical quantum computing. The difference between classical bits and quantum qubits --- binary vs. superposition, independent vs. entanglement --- adds complexity to QDA development on conventional synthesis, compilation, and verification processes. The inherent instability of quantum noise further compounds challenges.

 

In this seminar, I will provide our insights on three common questions for quantum computing from the public: “how quantum computing differs from or is similar to classical computing”, “what are the potential killer applications of quantum computing”, and “what is the near-term and long-term future of quantum computing”. The keywords to quickly respond to these questions are dependability, usability, and scalability, which will be presented in detail in the seminar, along with our recent QDA research conducted in these directions to achieve practical quantum computing for scientific applications.

 

 

Speaker Bio: Dr. Weiwen Jiang is an Assistant Professor in the ECE department at George Mason University. Prior to joining Mason, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Notre Dame. His research group, Junction of Quantum-Classical Computer-Aided Design Lab (JQub), has research focuses on quantum design automation and AI system optimizations. He has published more than 80 research articles in refereed international conferences and premier journals, including 10+ IEEE/ACM Transactions, Nature Communications, Nature Electronics papers. He is the recipient of the GMU Presidential Award on Faculty Excellence in Research, GMU CEC Faculty Excellence Award on Outstanding Tenure Track Assistant Professor, NSF CAREER AWARD 2025, ACM Sigda Meritorious Service Award 2024, the Best Paper Awards in IEEE QuantumWeek 2023, IEEE TCAD 2021, NVMSA’15 and ICCD’17, the Best Paper Nominations in ASP-DAC’16, DAC’19, CODES+ISSS’19, and ASP-DAC’20 Best Poster Award in ORNL’s Quantum Computing User Forum 2023, First Place of the 31st ACM SIGDA University Demonstration at DAC 2021, Second Place of the 32nd ACM SIGDA University Demonstration at DAC 2022, and Top Winning Awards at IEEE Services Hackathon 2020. Working with Oak Ridge National Lab, he created the StableQ workshop, which was funded by NSF in 2025. He served as Conference Technical Program Track Chair for IEEE Quantum Week from 2023 to 2025.