Utility scale
In a paper published today in 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.
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.
“Achieving utility scale in quantum computing hinges on finding a commercially viable way to produce high-fidelity quantum bits at scale,” said Prof. Dzurak.
“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 maximising fidelity.”
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.