Scalable modular architecture for universal quantum computation

Universal quantum computing requires the ability to perform every unitary operation, i.e., evolution operator controllability. In view of developing resource-efficient quantum processing units (QPUs), it is important to determine how many local controls and qubit-qubit couplings are required for controllability. Unfortunately, assessing the controllability of large qubit arrays is a difficult task, due to the exponential scaling of Hilbert space dimension. Here we show that it is sufficient to connect two qubit arrays that are evolution operator controllable by a single entangling two-qubit gate in order to obtain a composite qubit array that is evolution operator controllable. The proof provides a template to build up modular QPUs from smaller building blocks with reduced numbers of local controls and couplings. We illustrate the approach with two examples, consisting of 10, respectively 127 qubits, inspired by IBM quantum processors.