Amazon Web Services unveils Ocelot quantum computing chip

Venture Beat

Amazon Web Services has unveiled its Ocelot chip based on a hardware-efficient quantum computing architecture.

Fernando Brandão and Oskar Painter of AWS said in a blog post that the pair of silicon microchips that compose the Ocelot logical-qubit memory chip represent the company’s first-generation quantum chip, and it could reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90%.

Ocelot represents Amazon Web Services’ pioneering effort to develop, from the ground up, a hardware implementation of quantum error correction that is both resource efficient and scalable. Based on superconducting quantum circuits, Ocelot achieves the following major technical advances.

It is the first realization of a scalable architecture for bosonic error correction, surpassing traditional qubit approaches to reducing error-correction overhead.

It is the first implementation of a noise-biased gate—a key to unlocking hardware-efficient error correction necessary to build scalable, commercially viable quantum computers

And it offers fast performance for superconducting qubits, with bit-flip times approaching one second in tandem with phase-flip times of 20 microseconds.

“We believe that scaling Ocelot to a full-fledged quantum computer capable of transformative societal impact would require as little as one-tenth as many resources as common approaches, helping bring closer the age of practical quantum computing,” said Brandão and Painter.

The quantum performance gap

Quantum computers promise to perform some computations much faster — even exponentially faster — than classical computers. This means one can solve some problems with quantum computers that are forever out of reach of classical computing.

The anticipated practical applications of quantum computers require sophisticated quantum algorithms with billions of quantum gates — the basic operations of a quantum computer. But current quantum computers’ extreme sensitivity to environmental noise means that the best quantum hardware today can run only about a thousand gates without error. How do we bridge this gap?

Quantum error correction is the key to reliable quantum computing, the post said. Quantum error correction, first proposed theoretically in the 1990s, offers a solution. By redundantly encoding information in logical qubits, with their information shared across multiple physical qubits, one can protect the information within a quantum computer from external noise. Not only this, but errors can be detected and corrected in a manner analogous to the classical error correction methods used in digital storage and communication.

Recent experiments have demonstrated promising progress, but today’s best logical qubits, based on superconducting or atomic qubits, still exhibit error rates a billion times larger than the error rates needed for known quantum algorithms of practical utility and quantum advantage.

The challenge of qubit overhead

While quantum error correction provides a path to bridging the enormous chasm between today’s error rates and those required for practical quantum computation, it comes with a severe penalty in terms of resource overhead. Reducing logical-qubit error rates requires scaling up the redundancy in the number of physical qubits per logical qubit, AWS said.

Traditional quantum error correction methods, such as those using the surface error-correcting code, currently require thousands (and if we work really, really hard, maybe in the future, hundreds) of physical qubits per logical qubit to reach the desired error rates. That means that a commercially relevant quantum computer would require millions of physical qubits — many orders of magnitude beyond the qubit count of current hardware.

One fundamental reason for this high overhead is that quantum systems experience two types of errors: bit-flip errors (also present in classical bits) and phase-flip errors (unique to qubits).

Episode 4250 - Feb 27 - Tiếng Anh - AWS ra mắt chip điện toán lượng tử Ocelot - Vina Technology at AI time

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Episode 4250 - Feb 27 - Tiếng Anh - AWS ra mắt chip điện toán lượng tử Ocelot - Vina Technology at AI time