ARTIQ (Advanced Real-Time Infrastructure for Quantum physics) is the next-generation control system for quantum information experiments. It is maintained and developed by M-Labs and the initial development was for and in partnership with the Ion Storage Group at NIST. ARTIQ is free software and offered to the entire research community as a solution equally applicable to other challenging control tasks, including outside the field of ion trapping. Several other laboratories (e.g. at the University of Oxford, the Army Research Lab, and the University of Maryland) have later adopted ARTIQ as their control system and have contributed to it.

The system features a high-level programming language that helps describing complex experiments, which is compiled and executed on dedicated hardware with nanosecond timing resolution and sub-microsecond latency. It includes graphical user interfaces to parametrize and schedule experiments and to visualize and explore the results.

ARTIQ uses FPGA hardware to perform its time-critical tasks. The Sinara hardware, and in particular the Kasli FPGA carrier, is designed to work with ARTIQ. ARTIQ is designed to be portable to hardware platforms from different vendors and FPGA manufacturers. Several different configurations of a high-end FPGA evaluation kit are also used and supported. FPGA platforms can be combined with any number of additional peripherals, either already accessible from ARTIQ or made accessible with little effort.

ARTIQ and its dependencies are available in the form of Nix packages (for Linux) and Conda packages (for Windows and Linux). See the manual for installation instructions. Packages containing pre-compiled binary images to be loaded onto the hardware platforms are supplied for each configuration. Like any open source software ARTIQ can equally be built and installed directly from source.

ARTIQ is supported by M-Labs and developed openly. Components, features, fixes, improvements, and extensions are funded by and developed for the partnering research groups.

Technologies employed include Python, Migen, MiSoC/mor1kx, LLVM/llvmlite, and Qt5.

Website: https://m-labs.hk/artiq

Cite ARTIQ as Bourdeauducq, Sébastien et al. (2016). ARTIQ 1.0. Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.51303.

License

Copyright (C) 2014-2020 M-Labs Limited.

ARTIQ is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

ARTIQ is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with ARTIQ. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

The ARTIQ manifesto

The free and open dissemination of methods and results is central to scientific progress. The ARTIQ authors, contributors, and supporters consider the free and open exchange of scientific tools to be equally important and have chosen the licensing terms of ARTIQ accordingly. ARTIQ, including its gateware, the firmware, and the ARTIQ tools and libraries are licensed as LGPLv3+. This ensures that a user of ARTIQ obtains broad rights to use, redistribute, and modify it. The following statements are intended to clarify the interpretation and application of the licensing terms:

• There is no requirement to distribute any unmodified, modified, or extended versions of ARTIQ. Only when distributing ARTIQ the source needs to be made available.
• Unmodified, modified, or extended versions of ARTIQ can be distributed freely under the terms of the LGPLv3+.
• Your Experiments, Applets, and ARTIQ device drivers are considered "Applications" (see the LGPLv3+) and can be (but don't have to be) distributed under the terms of your choice. The public distribution under a free and open license is encouraged, however.
• Similarly, distribution and licensing of your experiment data, calibrations, or measurement results is entirely at your discretion.
• Other features, changes, and additions are considered modifications of ARTIQ and inherit the LGPLv3+. Those include for example adding new RTIO Phys, compiler optimizations, compiler features, ports of the compiler to other target CPUs, dashboard or browser features that are not in applets, as well as scheduler, master and runtime modifications.
• Analogously to the established practice in the Linux kernel, we do not consider components that are developed and used independently to be modifications of ARTIQ.
• For example, when developing a Phy for an independently developed and used gateware component, that gateware component is not considered a modification of ARTIQ (but the Phy is).