UNSW Sydney nano-tech startup Diraq has shown its quantum chips aren’t just lab-perfect prototypes – they also hold up in real-world production, maintaining the 99% accuracy needed to make quantum computers viable.<\/p>\n
Diraq, a pioneer of silicon-based quantum computing, achieved this feat by teaming up with European nanoelectronics institute Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (imec). Together they demonstrated the chips worked just as reliably coming off a semiconductor chip fabrication line as they do in the experimental conditions of a research lab at UNSW.<\/p>\n
UNSW Engineering Professor Andrew Dzurak, who is the founder and CEO of Diraq, said up until now it hadn’t been proven that the processors’ lab-based fidelity – meaning accuracy in the quantum computing world – could be translated to a manufacturing setting.<\/p>\n
“Now it’s clear that Diraq’s chips are fully compatible with manufacturing processes that have been around for decades.”<\/p>\n
In a paper published on Sept. 24\u00a0in Nature, the teams report that Diraq-designed, imec-fabricated devices achieved over 99% fidelity in operations involving two quantum bits – or ‘qubits’. The result is a crucial step towards Diraq’s quantum processors achieving utility scale, the point at which a quantum computer’s commercial value exceeds its operational cost. This is the key metric set out in the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program run by the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to gauge whether Diraq and 17 other companies can reach this goal.<\/p>\n
Utility-scale quantum computers are expected to be able to solve problems that are out of reach of the most advanced high-performance computers available today. But breaching the utility-scale threshold requires storing and manipulating quantum information in millions of qubits to overcome the errors associated with the fragile quantum state.<\/p>\n
“Achieving utility scale in quantum computing hinges on finding a commercially viable way to produce high-fidelity quantum bits at scale,” said Prof. Dzurak.<\/p>\n
“Diraq’s collaboration with imec makes it clear that silicon-based quantum computers can be built by leveraging the mature semiconductor industry, which opens a cost-effective pathway to chips containing millions of qubits while still maximizing fidelity.”<\/p>\n
Silicon is emerging as the front-runner among materials being explored for quantum computers – it can pack millions of qubits onto a single chip and works seamlessly with today’s trillion-dollar microchip industry, making use of the methods that put billions of transistors onto modern computer chips.<\/p>\n
Diraq has previously shown that qubits fabricated in an academic laboratory can achieve high fidelity when performing two-qubit logic gates, the basic building block of future quantum computers. However, it was unclear whether this fidelity could be reproduced in qubits manufactured in a semiconductor foundry environment.<\/p>\n
“Our new findings demonstrate that Diraq’s silicon qubits can be fabricated using processes that are widely used in semiconductor foundries, meeting the threshold for fault tolerance in a way that is cost-effective and industry-compatible,” Prof. Dzurak said.<\/p>\n
Diraq and imec previously showed that qubits manufactured using CMOS processes – the same technology used to build everyday computer chips – could perform single-qubit operations with 99.9% accuracy. But more complex operations using two qubits that are critical to achieving utility scale had not yet been demonstrated.<\/p>\n
“This latest achievement clears the way for the development of a fully fault-tolerant, functional quantum computer that is more cost effective than any other qubit platform,” Prof. Dzurak said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UNSW Sydney nano-tech startup Diraq has shown its quantum chips aren’t just lab-perfect prototypes – they also hold…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[49,48,93987,285,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-187255","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-computers-and-internet-markets-and-finance-artificial-intelligence-distributed-computing-computer-science-hacking-statistics-information-technology","11":"tag-computing","12":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}