Amazon Debuts Chip It Aims to Scale Into Quantum Computer

Amazon introduced its first quantum computing chip, following similar releases from Microsoft and Google.

Nicknamed “Ocelot,” this quantum chip “represents an important step in developing efficient means to scaling up to practical, fault-tolerant quantum computers,” Amazon wrote in a company blog post Thursday (Feb. 27).

“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,” Oskar Painter, director of quantum hardware for Amazon Web Services (AWS), said in the post. “Concretely, we believe this will accelerate our timeline to a practical quantum computer by up to five years.”

One of the biggest challenges presented by quantum computers is their high sensitivity to “noise” in their environment, from vibrations to electromagnetic interference from cell phones to cosmic rays, according to the post.

All of these things can knock qubits — the quantum bits used to process information in quantum computers — out of their quantum state, leading to errors and making it difficult to develop a quantum computer that can carry out reliable, “error-free calculations of any significant complexity,” the post said.

“The biggest challenge isn’t just building more qubits,” Painter said in the post. “It’s making them work reliably.”

While quantum computers rely on error correction to solve this problem, “the sheer number of qubits required to get accurate results,” means that current approaches to quantum error correction carry a prohibitive cost, per the post. However, Ocelot was designed with “built-in” error correction.

“We didn’t take an existing architecture and then try to incorporate error correction afterward,” Painter said in the post. “We selected our qubit and architecture with quantum error correction as the top requirement. We believe that if we’re going to make practical quantum computers, quantum error correction needs to come first.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced Feb. 19 that it created the world’s first “topoconductor,” which is a new type of matter — not solid, liquid or gas — that had until then existed only in theory. The topoconductor makes up the core of Majorana 1, the company’s new quantum chip.

Google said Feb. 5 that it is confident it would unveil commercial quantum computing applications in the next five years. The company, which has been working on quantum computing since 2012, has said the technology could be used in building superior batteries, creating new drugs and developing new energy sources.

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