Quantum computers could solve some of the world’s most challenging problems, but only if we can make them big enough. A new modular design for quantum chips could make building large-scale quantum computers far more feasible.
While there has been significant progress in building ever larger quantum processors, the technology is still light years from the kind of scale seen in conventional computer chips.
The inherent fragility of most qubit technologies combined with the complex control systems required to manipulate them mean that leading quantum computers based on superconducting qubits have only just crossed the 1,000-qubit mark.
A new platform designed by engineers at MIT and the MITRE Corporation could present a more scalable solution though. In a recent paper in Nature, they incorporated more than 4,000 qubits made from tiny defects in diamonds onto an integrated circuit, which was used to control them. In the future, several of these so-called “quantum systems-on-a-chip” could be connected using optical networking to create large-scale quantum computers, the researchers say.
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