CNOT-Optimal Clifford Synthesis as SAT

Clifford circuit optimization is an important step in the quantum compilation pipeline. Major compilers employ heuristic approaches. While they are fast, their results are often suboptimal. Minimization of noisy gates, like 2-qubit CNOT gates, is crucial for practical computing. Exact approaches have been proposed to fill the gap left by heuristic approaches. Among these are SAT based approaches that optimize gate count or depth, but they suffer from scalability issues. Further, they do not guarantee optimality on more important metrics like CNOT count or CNOT depth. A recent work proposed an exhaustive search only on Clifford circuits in a certain normal form to guarantee CNOT count optimality. But an exhaustive approach cannot scale beyond 6 qubits.In this paper, we incorporate search restricted to Clifford normal forms in a SAT encoding to guarantee CNOT count optimality. By allowing parallel plans, we propose a second SAT encoding that optimizes CNOT depth. By taking advantage of flexibility in SAT based approaches, we also handle connectivity restrictions in hardware platforms, and allow for qubit relabeling. We have implemented the above encodings and variations in our open source tool Q-Synth.In experiments, our encodings significantly outperform existing SAT approaches on random Clifford circuits. We consider practical VQE and Feynman benchmarks to compare with TKET and Qiskit compilers. In all-to-all connectivity, we observe reductions up to 32.1% in CNOT count and 48.1% in CNOT depth. Overall, we observe better results than TKET in the CNOT count and depth. We also experiment with connectivity restrictions of major quantum platforms. Compared to Qiskit, we observe up to 30.3% CNOT count and 35.9% CNOT depth further reduction.

@article{shaik2025_2504.00634,
  title={ CNOT-Optimal Clifford Synthesis as SAT },
  author={ Irfansha Shaik and Jaco van de Pol },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.00634},
  year={ 2025 }
}