Demonstration of a Multiplexing Trapped Ion Quantum Processing Unit

A fault-tolerant quantum computer is expected to require thousands of qubits. Trapped ion architectures provide a modular approach where the quantum register is divided into multiple subregisters connected by physically moving the corresponding ions. Transporting ions at scale comes with several challenges such as the need to connect thousands of control lines to an ion trap chip. Multiplexing the required control voltages from few input signals to multiple electrodes offers a solution to this wiring challenge. Here we demonstrate a quantum processing unit that combines a surface ion trap with a time multiplexer via a sample-and-hold technique that initially charges electrodes to fixed voltages and disconnects them during qubit operations. We characterize the unit's performance by measuring motional heating rates below one phonon per second in both open and closed switch configurations. We further characterize the sample and hold process and find that sampling intervals below 50 ms are sufficient to keep expected gate errors from decaying charges during the hold phase below 10^-4. Our results indicate that the multiplexing scheme is compatible with high-fidelity operations.