Amazon unveils new quantum chip 'Ocelot,' aiming to realize commercial quantum computers at a much lower cost than before
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the quantum computing chip 'Ocelot,' which claims to reduce the implementation cost of quantum error correction by up to 90% compared to current approaches.
Amazon's new Ocelot chip brings us closer to building a practical quantum computer
Hardware-efficient quantum error correction via concatenated bosonic qubits | Nature
Amazon announces Ocelot quantum chip - Amazon Science
https://www.amazon.science/blog/amazon-announces-ocelot-quantum-chip
Take a look inside AWS's quantum computing lab - YouTube
Ocelot is a prototype quantum computing chip designed to test the effectiveness of AWS' quantum error correction architecture.
Quantum computers, which use quantum chips, are expected to perform much better than conventional computers, but they have the drawback of being highly susceptible to slight changes in their environment, or 'noise.' Vibrations, heat, electromagnetic interference from mobile phones and Wi-Fi networks, and even cosmic rays can interfere with the qubits and cause errors in calculations.
To solve this problem, quantum computers employ a technique called quantum error correction, which uses quantum information across multiple qubits in the form of a special encoding, or 'logical' qubit, that can detect and correct errors that occur by isolating the quantum information from its environment. However, current approaches to quantum error correction are prohibitively expensive, as they require a huge number of qubits to produce accurate results.
Ocelot was developed to address these issues. While a typical development flow would be to 'adopt an existing architecture and then incorporate error correction,' AWS' research team chose quantum bits and architecture with error correction as the primary requirement from the beginning. The AWS research team newly designed ' Cat qubits' that suppress certain types of errors and reduce the resources required for quantum error correction, and packed the cat qubits and related components into a microchip.
Ocelot consists of two silicon microchips. Each chip is roughly one square centimeter in area, and on the surface of each silicon microchip is a thin layer of superconducting material that forms the quantum circuit element. The cat qubit stores the quantum state used in the calculations, but this mechanism relies on a component called an 'oscillator' that generates a stable and repeatable electrical signal. To improve the performance of the oscillator, the AWS research team developed a method to process a superconducting material called '
According to the AWS research team, Ocelot could be scaled up for practical use at one-tenth the cost of existing approaches.
AWS said, 'While today's announcement is a promising start, Ocelot is still a prototype and we are committed to continuing to invest in quantum research to improve our approach. Quantum chips built according to the Ocelot architecture dramatically reduce the number of resources required for error correction, which we believe could accelerate the realization of practical quantum computers by up to five years.'
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