Taming Spacetime Overhead and Design Complexity in Distributed Fault-Tolerant Superconducting Quantum Computation

Abstract

Scaling fault-tolerant superconducting quantum computers will likely require distributed architectures built from multiple manufacturable quantum processing units. A central question is whether noisy and slow inter-chip operations impose substantial spacetime overhead or orchestration burdens compared with monolithic architectures. To answer this question, we present a hardware-grounded architectural co-design together with a comprehensive resource-estimation protocol for surface-code-based modular processors. The design confines inter-chip latency and noise to module boundaries, preventing slow, noisy links from inducing prohibitive spacetime overhead or becoming a global orchestration bottleneck. The resource-estimation protocol integrates hardware constraints and circuit-level error-correction performance into utility-scale algorithmic cost estimates, enabling a controlled assessment of different architectures. Using RSA-2048 factorization as a demanding benchmark, we estimate resources under experimentally anchored parameters and realistic superconducting hardware constraints. Compared with a large, ideal monolithic baseline, the resulting distributed architecture requires only modest additional resource overhead in both qubit count and execution time. More importantly, the overhead is nearly scale-invariant across a broad module-capacity window, decoupling chip size from global performance. This decoupling turns module capacity from a finely tuned architectural parameter into a flexible engineering degree of freedom, allowing chip sizes to be set by manufacturability and control-packaging constraints rather than architectural fine-tuning. These results establish a viable route to distributed fault-tolerant superconducting quantum computation that scales without prohibitive resource growth or heavy orchestration burden.