QCE2026

Qubit Control with QICK: The Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit

Event: IEEE Quantum Week (QCE26) Tutorial

Link: TUT::QTEM::QSYS::518

Date: Sun 13 September 2026

• Session 1: 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EDT
• Session 2: 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EDT

Location: Toronto, Canada

Overview

This tutorial covers QICK, the Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit, an open-source RF control and readout system used for qubits, quantum networks, and quantum sensors¹².

Slides here: QUBIT Control with QICK

Teaching Team

• Gustavo Cancelo (Fermilab)³
• Sara Sussman (Fermilab)⁴
• Luis H. Arnaldi (Fermilab)⁵

Agenda

Below is the preliminary schedule for the tutorial.

Session 1

• 1:00 pm - 1:30 pm: Introductions
• 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm: Science highlights, education and scaling up

Session 2

• 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm: The QICK Emulator (QICKEmu)
• 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm: QICK and the QICK box (demos)

Requirements and Demos

Participants who wish to follow along with the demos should ensure their environment is set up prior to the tutorial.

The QICK Emulator (Session 2)

No hardware required. The emulator (QICKEmu) runs real QICK programs against a Verilator simulation of the RFSoC firmware instead of a physical board, so anyone can follow along on their own laptop. This work was done as part of a Clinic in collaboration between the Harvey Mudd College (HMC), HRL Laboratories and QICK.

The people involved in the development:

Students (HMC): Jesica Liu, Matthew Molinar, Corey Hickson, Troy Kaufman, Santiago Burgos-Fallon, Simone Yang and Abraham Rock.

Advisor (HMC): Jason Gallicchio

Liason (HRL Laboratories): Andrew Oriani, Abigail Wessels and Paul Jerger

Liason (QICK): Diego Martin

Easiest way to follow along: Google Colab. No install on your machine – click a notebook below and run its first cell (“Colab Setup”). It clones the repo and sets up the emulator automatically; Verilator installs from a prebuilt binary in a few seconds, or builds from source (a few minutes) as a fallback. Everything after that first cell is a normal QICK notebook.

#	Notebook	Covers	Open
00	Getting Started	Initialize the emulator, inspect the (simulated) hardware config
01	Basic Sequencing	Program structure, pulse styles, acquiring data
02	Parameter Sweeps	1D/2D sweeps with QickSweep1D, QickSpan
03	Advanced Timing	delay vs wait, avoiding pulse collisions
04	Real-Time Feedback	Conditional pulses, active reset
05	Dynamic Parameters & Subroutines	Virtual-Z gates, subroutines, waveform memory
06	Generators and Readouts	Pulse shapes, IQ mixing, readout characterization
07	Advanced Generators and Readouts	Muxed generators/PFB readout, electrical delay calibration

Start at 00 - Getting Started if this is your first time with QICK.

Running locally instead? See emulator/README.md in the QICK repo for local setup (Verilator, a Python environment, and a Jupyter kernel).

References

1. QICK Documentation ↩

2. QICK Github page ↩

3. Senior Principal Engineer at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and QICK PI. More information at Fermilab. ↩

4. PostDoc and QICK Dev Team member at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. More information at Google Scholar. ↩

5. Principal Engineer and QICK Dev Team member at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. More information at Google Scholar. ↩