The “revolutionary” technology will scale to millions of qubits orchestrated on a single chip, the company said.

Irish quantum computing company Equal1 has announced what it calls a “major breakthrough for the quantum computing industry” by successfully testing the “world’s most complex and coldest” quantum controller chip.

Today (December 3), the UCD spinout announced the world’s “first” multi-tile quantum controller chip featured in its UnityQ Quantum-System-on-Chip platform.

The chip operates at cryogenic temperatures of 300 millikelvins – or nearly minus 273 degrees Celsius – and is powered by Cortex core microprocessors produced by British semiconductor company Arm.

According to Equal1, this “revolutionary technology” will enable millions of qubits orchestrated on a single chip, improving the scalability of quantum computing.

The new controller chip also features patented AI-enabled qubit adaptive error correction, tuned for each tile under the support and control of Arm’s Cortex processor.

This approach “facilitates the potential for real-time error correction, combined with the flexibility to use current and future types of error correction algorithms,” the company said.

“Equal1’s vision was decades in the making,” said Dirk Leipold, Equal1’s president and chief physicist. “I am very proud of what we have accomplished over the past 6 years and am excited about what the future holds as we launch the era of scalable quantum computing.”

“Quantum travel has the potential to revolutionize data processing for multiple uses, from complex financial modeling to life-saving drug discovery,” said Dermot O’Driscoll, vice president of product solutions at Arm. .

“With the integration of Arm technology at cryogenic temperatures, Equal1 is at the forefront of building a next-generation quantum system-on-a-chip, and we look forward to continuing our work with them to advance the future of quantum computing. »

“World-leading measurements” for a qubit silicon chip

Equal 1 also demonstrated “state-of-the-art” performance for its silicon qubit array chips.

According to the company, its single-qubit gate had a fidelity – or a measure of precision – of 99.4% and a gate speed – referring to the time required to perform a quantum gate operation – of 84 nanoseconds, and a two-qubit gate. silicon chip made with 98.4% fidelity and a gate speed of 72 nanoseconds.

The company said it obtained these results on a six-qubit array fabricated using a silicon germanium CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) compatible process.

“Today marks a critical inflection point for Equal1 and the quantum computing industry,” said Equal1 Chief Scientific Officer Elena Blokhina.

“Equal1 has always believed that silicon is the way to scale quantum computers and today, with these cutting-edge results in qubits and control chips, we have taken a major step toward that vision.”

Nodar Samkharadze, the company’s chief quantum architect, said: “This result demonstrates the enormous advantage of silicon qubits, the ability to achieve the performance required for scaling in two key areas: the fidelity and speed of quantum gates. »

In 2021, Equal1 announced that it was the first company to demonstrate a fully integrated quantum processor unit (QPU) operating at 3.7 Kelvin.

Earlier this year, Equal1 and Nvidia – the world’s most valuable company – announced a collaboration on quantum technology use casesbusiness models and proofs of concept.

According to the two companies, their joint work will see Equal1’s hybrid silicon classical quantum hardware and its UnityQ quantum system-on-chip combined with Nvidia’s CUDA-Q quantum software platform, focusing on the integration and validation of quantum classical infrastructure for cloud and data center deployments.

Founded in 2017 by Leipold and Mike Asker, Equal1 won the award this year Quantum Business Innovation and Growth Award.

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