Amazon reveals quantum chips designed to scrape off several years of development time

Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) – Amazon Web Services on Thursday showed a quantum computing chip using new technology, hoping it can shave for up to five years to make commercially useful quantum computers.

The chip, called Ocelot, is a prototype that only has a small portion of the computing power required to create a useful computer. But like Amazon.com’s cloud computing unit, like its technology rival AWS, AWS believes it can finally attack as technology that can scale to work machines, although it has not yet been determined when it will reach that point.

The AWS announcement coincides with the publication of peer-reviewed papers in Science Journal, and Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and Startup Psiquantum have all announced progress in recent months as quantum computing swept across the technology world.

Quantum computers have the hope of executing computers, which will make traditional computers millions of years and can help scientists develop new materials, such as batteries and new drugs. However, the basic building blocks of quantum computers called Qubit are fast but are prone to errors.

Scientists established in the 1990s that some quantum computers could work to correct these errors, and the years since have been spent finding ways to construct physical quantums in order to quantize enough “logical” quantums for useful computational work.

The standard industry idea is that chips will require about one million physical quantum platforms to produce useful logical quantums.

But AWS said it has built a prototype chip that uses only nine physical Qubits to produce a working logical quantum, thanks to the use of so-called “cat” quantum, named after physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment to illustrate the principles of quantum mechanics, in which an unfortunate cat in the box is dead and alive in the same era.

AWS’s quantum hardware director Oskar Painter said that the AWS approach could one day produce useful computers instead of 100,000 QUATs instead of a million.

“This should allow us to provide a physical Qub number reduced by five to 10 times to achieve error correction in a fully scaled machine. So, that’s the real benefit.”

The painter says the current chips are built using standard technology borrowed from the chip industry and a material called tantalum, but AWS and partners want to customize these technologies further.

“That’s where I think there will be a lot of innovation, and that’s something that can really be developed in the timeline. If we improve on the material and processing level, that will make the underlying technology much simpler.”

(Report from Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Edited by Stephen Coates)