David Reilly and his team at the Microsoft Quantum lab at the University of Sydney have developed forward-thinking hardware systems for quantum computers, which allow for communication of information between qubits and the outside world while also maintaining the stability of these qubits, a delicate and intricate task. Until now, this has necessitated a bird’s nest-like tangle of cables, which could work for limited numbers of qubits (and, perhaps, even at an “intermediate scale”) but not for large-scale quantum computers.ĭr. But all of this must be accomplished while enabling communication with the qubits.
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Hence, it is necessary to develop a full system, made up of many components, that maintains a regulated, stable environment. This involves cooling them nearly down to absolute zero temperature and isolating them from outside disruptions, like electrical noise. Since quantum states are easily disturbed by the environment, researchers must go to extraordinary lengths to protect them. Combining qubits into complex devices and manipulating them can open the door to solutions that would take lifetimes for even the most powerful classical computers.ĭespite the unmatched potential computing power of qubits, they have an Achilles’ heel: great instability. These foundational units of quantum computation are known as qubits (short for quantum bits). The building blocks of quantum computers are not just zeroes and ones but superpositions of zeroes and ones. Quantum computing could impact chemistry, cryptography, and many more fields in game-changing ways.
These novel classical computing technologies solve the I/O nightmares associated with controlling thousands of qubits.
This core performs the classical computations needed to determine the instructions that are sent to Gooseberry which, in turn, feeds voltage pulses to the qubits. They’ve also developed a general-purpose cryo-compute core that operates at the slightly warmer temperatures comparable to that of interstellar space, which can be achieved by immersion in liquid Helium. Rather than employing a rack of room-temperature electronics to generate voltage pulses to control qubits in a special-purpose refrigerator whose base temperature is 20 times colder than interstellar space, they invented a control chip, dubbed Gooseberry, that sits next to the quantum device and operates in the extreme conditions prevalent at the base of the fridge. Microsoft’s David Reilly, leading a team of Microsoft and University of Sydney researchers, has developed a novel approach to the latter problem. Both of these problems must, moreover, be solved at a scale far beyond that of present-day quantum device technology. One thing that makes this so challenging is that quantum devices must be ensconced in an extreme environment in order to preserve quantum information, but signals must be sent to each qubit in order to manipulate this information-requiring, in essence, an information superhighway into this extreme environment. Quantum computing offers the promise of solutions to previously unsolvable problems, but in order to deliver on this promise, it will be necessary to preserve and manipulate information that is contained in the most delicate of resources: highly entangled quantum states.