Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced its first-generation quantum computing chip, named Ocelot. According to the company, this new chip is designed to potentially reduce the costs associated with implementing quantum error correction by as much as 90%.
Quantum research is a rapidly evolving field, attracting substantial investments from countries like the United States and China. Tech giants are also intensely competing to advance this still-experimental technology.
Ocelot was developed by the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, located at the California Institute of Technology. Oskar Painter, AWS Director of Quantum Hardware, stated, “With the recent advancements in quantum research, it is no longer a matter of if, but when practical, fault-tolerant quantum computers will be available for real-world applications. Ocelot is an important step on that journey.” He further explained, “In the future, quantum chips built according to the Ocelot architecture could cost as little as one-fifth of current approaches, due to the drastically reduced number of resources required for error correction. Concretely, we believe this will accelerate our timeline to a practical quantum computer by up to five years.”
A significant challenge in quantum computing stems from the sensitivity of quantum computers to environmental ‘noise,’ including vibrations, heat, and electromagnetic interference from devices like cell phones and Wi-Fi networks, as Amazon noted in a media release. Painter emphasized, “The biggest challenge isn’t just building more qubits. It’s making them work reliably.”
To mitigate these challenges, quantum computers employ quantum error correction, utilizing special encodings of quantum information across numerous qubits. However, current approaches to quantum error correction have been very costly because of the sheer number of qubits needed for accurate operations.
To address the limitations of existing quantum error correction methods, researchers at AWS developed Ocelot. The company stated that Ocelot was designed from the ground up with “built in” error correction.
Scientists at AWS have published their findings in the journal Nature.
Amazon is the third major tech firm to reveal a new experimental chip. Microsoft recently unveiled its Majorana 1 chip, which uses a “topoconductor” material, described by the company as an entirely new state of matter. Google’s Willow is also believed to aid in addressing errors in quantum systems.
