PACOX: A FPGA-based Pauli Composer Accelerator for Pauli String Computation

Abstract: Pauli strings are a fundamental computational primitive in hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. However, classical computation of Pauli strings suffers from exponential complexity and quickly becomes a performance bottleneck as the number of qubits increases. To address this challenge, this paper proposes the Pauli Composer Accelerator (PACOX), the first dedicated FPGA-based accelerator for Pauli string computation. PACOX employs a compact binary encoding with XOR-based index permutation and phase accumulation. Based on this formulation, we design a parallel and pipelined processing element (PE) cluster architecture that efficiently exploits data-level parallelism on FPGA. Experimental results on a Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA show that PACOX operates at 250 MHz with a dynamic power consumption of 0.33 W, using 8,052 LUTs, 10,934 FFs, and 324 BRAMs. For Pauli strings of up to 19 qubits, PACOX achieves speedups of up to 100 times compared with state-of-the-art CPU-based methods, while requiring significantly less memory and achieving a much lower power-delay product. These results demonstrate that PACOX delivers high computational speed with superior energy efficiency for Pauli-based workloads in hybrid quantum-classical systems.