PsiQuantum shows quantum chips, PsiCube cooling
PsiQuantum has detailed the photonic quantum chips and cooling system it plans to use for a quantum computer with a million qubits.
The Omega quantum photonic chipset is purpose-built for utility-scale quantum computing and produced by Global Foundries in New York on 300mm wafer. The technology was detailed in a paper in Nature submitted last June and published this week.
This paper shows high-fidelity qubit operations, and a simple, long-range chip-to-chip qubit interconnect – a key enabler to scale that has remained challenging for other technologies.
PsiQuantum, which has raised over $665m, will break ground this year on two datacentre-sized Quantum Compute Centres in Brisbane, Australia and Chicago, Illinois.
“For more than 25 years it has been my conviction that in order for us to realize a useful quantum computer in my lifetime, we must find a way to fully leverage the unmatched capabilities of the semiconductor industry. This paper vindicates that belief,” Prof. Jeremy O’Brien, PsiQuantum Co-founder & CEO.
A new cooling system for temperatures down to tens of kelvins avoids the need for the chandelier cryostat used by other quantum computers. The PsiCube is more manufacturable cuboid design, closer to a datacentre server rack, and has been installed at the company’s UK research centre at Daresbury, Cheshire.
The PsiCube rack cooling (right) at Daresbury
PsiQuantum’s approach is based on using single photons with silicon photonic chip (PIC) technology originally developed for telecom and datacentre networking, but with new superconducting materials. The PIC uses Barium Titanate (BTO) for low-loss, high speed optical switching which is developed and produced by PsiQuantum in San Jose, California.
A new fault tolerant error correction architecture it calls fusion based quantum computing (FBQC) combines the single photons together to create larger entangled states.
PsiQuantum is now wiring these chips together across racks, into increasingly large-scale multi-chip systems at a new manufacturing and testing facility in Silicon Valley. The photonic chips are designed to be networked using standard telecom optical fibre without any conversion and PsiQuantum has already demonstrated high-fidelity quantum interconnects over distances up to 250m.
“Semiconductor manufacturing will inevitably be a large part of any solution to building quantum computers at scale. At GlobalFoundries, we know the immense challenge of engineering advanced devices with this level of rigor at scale, and we’ve been consistently impressed by PsiQuantum’s expertise and progress. Our partnership combines GlobalFoundries’ world-class photonics manufacturing with PsiQuantum’s advanced capability in photonic quantum computing, and the results so far have been remarkable,” said Tom Caulfield, CEO of GlobalFoundries, who has recently moved to chair GF and is being seen as a potential CEO for Intel, which also makes quantum chips and systems.
“Omega moves us beyond a science project,” said Pete Shadbolt, PsiQuantum Co-founder & Chief Scientific Officer. “Before we started PsiQuantum, my cofounders and I were in a university lab playing around with a couple of qubits but we knew then that the platform we were using was sorely deficient.”
“We knew that we needed millions of qubits and we knew that implied getting into a mature fab, integration of unlikely components together into a single platform, and climbing a performance curve that at the time seemed borderline impossible. It has been amazing to see how the team has executed on those plans from a decade ago, and it is tremendously exciting to now have the technology in our hands that we will use to build the first commercially useful systems,” he said.
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