AWS has built a quantum chip for the first time: Ocelot. The hyperscaler says it’s able to correct quantum errors by a staggering 90 percent. In doing so, it follows in the footsteps of Google and Microsoft, both of whom also made recent strides in developing quantum chips with a potential to scale up.
Ocelot was developed by the AWS Center for Quantum Computing. It uses a novel, scalable and hardware-efficient architecture for error correction. The chip uses so-called “cat qubits,” named after the famous thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat.
Breakthrough in quantum error correction
Quantum error correction is one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing. It is such a big problem that any announcement in this field is centred on reducing said errors. For example, Google presented its Willow chip as the most error-resistant ever in December, while Microsoft also tackled the error-prone nature of qubit-based computing with what it claims are homegrown Majorana particules inside the chip of the same name.
AWS, for its part, designed the Ocelot architecture from the ground up to implement error correction efficiently. According to the company, this approach can reduce the resources required for quantum error correction by a factor of 5 to 10 compared with conventional methods.
Like Microsoft, AWS needs special matter for its own ambitions. A superconducting layer of tantalum has been applied to Ocelot’s oscillator, which is a core component for the chip architecture. As such, the name Ocelot is a reference to both this oscillator and the cat species of the same name, which in turn refers to the aforementioned cat qubits.
Technical specifications
The Ocelot chip consists of two integrated silicon microchips about 1 cm² in size. These contain 14 core components, including five data qubits, five buffer circuits for stabilization and four additional qubits for error detection. Like previous quantum computing initiatives, AWS is working to increase scale and reliability.
Future prospects
Although Ocelot is still a laboratory prototype, AWS sees it as an important step toward practical quantum computing. As with Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip, the current scale is currently too tiny to revolutionize computing. But, as they say: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Or, well a handful of qubits are the ground floor to building a million-qubit quantum computer.
Tip: Scalable quantum network becomes a reality in Port of Rotterdam