Quantum control chip eliminates ion trap lasers
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Oxford Ionics has demonstrated the world’s highest performing quantum chip, eliminating the need for lasers to control ion trap qubits and allowing simpler scalable quantum computers.
The Electronic Qubit Control system developed by Oxford Ionics can be produced at scale in a standard semiconductor fabrication plant, and the company plans to build a scalable 256 qubit ion trap quantum processor, expected to be built by Infineon at Villach in Austria.
Until now, trapped ion quantum processors have been difficult to scale as they are typically controlled by lasers. The electronically controlled trapped-ion quantum chip uses shared current-carrying traces and local tuning electrodes in a microfabricated chip to perform quantum gates with low noise and crosstalk regardless of device size.
Oxford Ionics experimentally demonstrated low-noise site-selective single- and two-qubit gates in a seven-zone ion trap that can control up to 10 qubits. Electronic single-qubit gates have 99.99916% fidelity, and demonstrate consistent performance with low crosstalk across the device. Two-qubit maximally entangled states have 99.97% fidelity and long-term stable performance over continuous system operation.
These state-of-the-art results validate the path to directly scaling these techniques to large-scale quantum computers that integrate everything needed to control them into a silicon chip that can be mass-produced using standard semiconductor manufacturing facilities and processes.
The quantum chips provide over twice the performance, without needing error correction, using 10x fewer qubits.
“The new results mark a pivotal step forwards in ion trap quantum computing and validates the scalability of the technology. The reported one and two qubit gate results outperform other players’ achievements to date, meaning error correction becomes achievable with minimal overheads,” said Dr Michael Cuthbert, Director of the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre.
“This performance underpins the proprietary architecture Oxford Ionics will deliver to the National Quantum Computing Centre as part of our Quantum Computing Testbed procurement and we are really excited to see both how this will be deployed, and how we will be able to use these ultra-high performance qubits for the development of algorithms and new applications.”
Dr Chris Ballance, co-founder and CEO of Oxford Ionics, said: “The industry’s biggest players have taken different paths towards the goal of making quantum computing a reality. From the outset, we have taken a ‘rocket ship’ approach – focusing on building robust technology by solving the really difficult challenges first. This has meant using novel physics and smart engineering to develop scalable, high performance qubit chips that do not need error correction to get to useful applications, and can be controlled on a classic semiconductor chip. Since we started in 2019, we have hit every target on our roadmap on time and today’s results validate our confidence in our approach. We are now able to focus on the commercialisation of our technology and delivering useful quantum computing at scale.”
Dr Tom Harty, co-founder and CTO at Oxford Ionics, said: “When you build a quantum computer, performance is as important as size – increasing the number of qubits means nothing if they do not produce accurate results. We have now proven that our approach has delivered the highest level of performance in quantum computing to date, and is now at the level required to start unlocking the commercial impact of quantum computing. This is an incredibly exciting moment for our team, and for the positive impact that quantum computing will have on society at large.”
Oxford Ionics has raised £37 million to date for its ionb trap quantum qubit technology with investors including Braavos, OSE, Lansdowne Partners, Prosus Ventures, 2xN, and Hermann Hauser of ARM and has an R&D partnership with Infineon Technologies.
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