Amazon unveils its first quantum computing chip Ocelot
Quantum research is an important emerging field, and countries like the US and China have been investing heavily in it. Tech giants are also in the race to get ahead in the experimental technology.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled Ocelot, the company’s first-generation quantum computing chip. The new chip can slash the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90%, the company said.
Quantum research is an important emerging field, and countries like the US and China have been investing heavily in it. Tech giants including Amazon’s competitors are also in the race to get ahead in the still experimental technology.
Ocelot was developed by the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology.
“With the recent advancements in quantum research, it is no longer a matter of if, but when practical, fault-tolerant quantum computers will be available for real-world applications. Ocelot is an important step on that journey,” said Oskar Painter, AWS director of Quantum Hardware. “In the future, quantum chips built according to the Ocelot architecture could cost as little as one-fifth of current approaches, due to the drastically reduced number of resources required for error correction. Concretely, we believe this will accelerate our timeline to a practical quantum computer by up to five years.”
A major challenge with quantum computers is that they’re very sensitive to the smallest changes, or ‘noise’ in their environment, such as vibrations, heat, electromagnetic interference from cell phones and Wi-Fi networks, Amazon said in a media release.
“The biggest challenge isn’t just building more qubits,” said Painter. “It’s making them work reliably.”
To tackle this problem, quantum computers rely on quantum error correction that uses special encodings of quantum information across multiple qubits. But the sheer number of qubits required to get accurate results, current approaches to quantum error correction have come at a huge cost.
To address the current problems associated with quantum error correction, researchers at AWS developed Ocelot. Ocelot was designed from the ground up with error correction “built in,” the company said.
Scientists at AWS have published their findings in the journal Nature.
Amazon is the third tech giant to announce a new experimental chip. Microsoft recently unveiled its Majorana 1 chip, which uses a material called topoconductor, an entirely new state of matter, according to the company. Google’s Willow is also believed to address errors that occur in quantum systems.
