Now Amazon has unveiled its own quantum computing chip

Promises 90% better error correction

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Ocelot consists of two integrated silicon microchips, each woth an area of about 1cm2. They are bonded one on top of the other in an electrically-connected chip stack.

Ocelot’s architecture could slash the cost of producing quantum chips by four-fifths, claims Amazon.

Amazon has unveiled Ocelot, its first quantum computing chip, just a week after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed his company’s Majorana 1 Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) had created a new state of matter.

The chip was developed at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology.

Amazon claims its new chip, Ocelot, can reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90% compared to conventional approaches, improving the fault tolerance of quantum computing.

The introduction of errors or noise and the consequent need to correct those errors is one of the key factors holding back implementation of viable quantum computing. The errors are introduced due to background noise interfering in the computations, despite quantum computers running at close to absolute zero or -273 degrees Celsius.

“AWS used a novel design for Ocelot’s architecture, building error correction in from the ground up and using the ‘cat qubit’ [to] intrinsically suppress certain forms of errors, reducing the resources required for quantum error correction,” the company explained.

The cat qubit, named for Schrodinger’s cat, intrinsically suppresses certain forms of errors, reducing the resources required for quantum error correction.

AWS added that it had combined cat qubit technology with additional quantum error correction components onto a microchip that can be manufactured in a scalable fashion, similar to conventional computer chips.

The company claims the Ocelot architecture could cut the cost of manufacturing quantum chips by up to 80% “due to the drastically reduced number of resources required for error correction…. We believe this will accelerate our timeline to a practical quantum computer by up to five years”.

According to Fernando Brandão and Oskar Painter, both directors of applied science at Amazon, Ocelot achieves the following major technical advances in superconducting quantum circuits:

  • The first realisation of a scalable architecture for ‘bosonic error correction’, a means of reducing environmental noise and imperfections in the operation of quantum computing;
  • The first implementation of a noise-biased gate – unlocking hardware-efficient error correction necessary for building scalable, commercially viable quantum computers;
  • State-of-the-art performance for superconducting qubits, with ‘bit-flip times’ approaching one second in tandem with phase-flip times of 20 microseconds.

The researchers behind the chip design have published a scientific paper in Nature to explain the technology in more technical depth.

The news comes as more and more resources are being diverted to research into quantum computing, which could both revolutionise computing but also render current forms of encryption and security redundant. IBM claims that it has a quantum software stack all ready to go for business, and even the National Quantum Computing Centre in the UK has joined in, proposing to house 12 quantum computers in Harwell, Oxfordshire that business and researchers will be able to time share.