Imroatul Nasiyah
UNSW Sydney’s pioneering nano-tech startup, Diraq, has achieved a monumental breakthrough, demonstrating that its quantum chips are not merely pristine laboratory prototypes but are robust enough to withstand the rigors of real-world production, crucially maintaining the 99% accuracy essential for making quantum computers a viable and impactful reality. This landmark achievement, detailed in a groundbreaking paper published on September 24th in the prestigious journal Nature, marks a significant leap forward in the quest for utility-scale quantum computing, a threshold where the commercial value of these revolutionary machines will unequivocally surpass their operational costs.
Diraq, a frontrunner in the development of silicon-based quantum computing, collaborated with the esteemed European nanoelectronics institute, imec, to realize this critical validation. Together, they have conclusively shown that the quantum chips produced through imec’s state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication lines exhibit the same, if not superior, reliability and precision as those meticulously crafted and tested under the controlled, experimental conditions of a research laboratory at UNSW. This partnership effectively bridges the gap between theoretical promise and practical implementation, a hurdle that has long constrained the advancement of quantum technologies.
Professor Andrew Dzurak, the visionary founder and CEO of Diraq and a distinguished Professor of Engineering at UNSW, articulated the profound significance of this development. "Up until now," he explained, "it hadn’t been proven that the processors’ lab-based fidelity – meaning accuracy in the quantum computing world – could be translated to a manufacturing setting. Now it’s clear that Diraq’s chips are fully compatible with manufacturing processes that have been around for decades." This statement underscores the revolutionary nature of Diraq’s achievement: the ability to leverage the established, trillion-dollar semiconductor industry to build quantum computers, a stark contrast to the bespoke and often prohibitively expensive methods previously explored.
The Nature publication highlights the remarkable success of Diraq-designed, imec-fabricated devices. These quantum processors achieved an impressive fidelity exceeding 99% in operations involving two quantum bits, or ‘qubits’. This level of accuracy is not merely an incremental improvement; it is a fundamental requirement for the advancement of quantum computing towards utility scale. The Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a vital program spearheaded by the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sets this utility-scale metric as the benchmark for gauging the progress of Diraq and 17 other leading companies in the field.
The promise of utility-scale quantum computers is immense. These machines are anticipated to tackle complex problems that lie beyond the reach of even the most powerful high-performance computers available today. These could include groundbreaking discoveries in drug development and materials science, optimization of financial markets, advanced climate modeling, and the breaking of current encryption standards. However, breaching the utility-scale threshold is an enormous engineering challenge. It necessitates the precise storage and manipulation of quantum information within millions of qubits. This vast number of qubits is essential to overcome the inherent errors associated with the extremely fragile nature of quantum states, which are highly susceptible to environmental noise and decoherence.
"Achieving utility scale in quantum computing hinges on finding a commercially viable way to produce high-fidelity quantum bits at scale," Professor Dzurak emphasized. "Diraq’s collaboration with imec makes it clear that silicon-based quantum computers can be built by leveraging the mature semiconductor industry, which opens a cost-effective pathway to chips containing millions of qubits while still maximizing fidelity." This synergy between Diraq’s innovative qubit design and imec’s manufacturing prowess is the key to unlocking this cost-effective scalability.
Silicon has emerged as a leading material contender in the global race to build quantum computers. Its inherent advantages are numerous: it possesses the capacity to integrate millions of qubits onto a single chip, a feat that is crucial for achieving the required scale. Furthermore, silicon integrates seamlessly with the existing, highly developed trillion-dollar microchip industry. This allows for the adoption and adaptation of the sophisticated manufacturing methods that have successfully placed billions of transistors onto modern computer chips, a testament to the industry’s decades of refinement and innovation.
Diraq had previously established a strong track record in academic laboratories, demonstrating that its fabricated qubits could achieve high fidelity when performing two-qubit logic gates, the fundamental operations that form the building blocks of future quantum computers. The critical unknown, however, was whether this high level of fidelity could be replicated and maintained when these qubits were manufactured in a high-volume semiconductor foundry environment, which operates under vastly different conditions than a controlled research setting.
"Our new findings demonstrate that Diraq’s silicon qubits can be fabricated using processes that are widely used in semiconductor foundries, meeting the threshold for fault tolerance in a way that is cost-effective and industry-compatible," Professor Dzurak stated with confidence. Fault tolerance, in the context of quantum computing, refers to the ability of the system to correct errors that inevitably arise due to the delicate nature of qubits. Achieving this in a cost-effective and industry-compatible manner is a game-changer.
This latest breakthrough builds upon Diraq and imec’s prior success in demonstrating that qubits manufactured using Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) processes – the identical technology underpinning the production of everyday computer chips – could achieve an astounding 99.9% accuracy in single-qubit operations. While this was a significant achievement, the more complex two-qubit operations, which are indispensable for performing meaningful quantum computations and ultimately achieving utility scale, had not yet been definitively demonstrated in a production setting.
The successful demonstration of high-fidelity two-qubit operations in a manufactured silicon chip is the critical missing piece of the puzzle. "This latest achievement clears the way for the development of a fully fault-tolerant, functional quantum computer that is more cost effective than any other qubit platform," Professor Dzurak concluded. This statement paints a vivid picture of the future: quantum computers that are not only powerful and capable of solving humanity’s most pressing challenges but also economically accessible and manufacturable at scale. The implications are profound, promising to accelerate innovation across a multitude of scientific and industrial sectors and ushering in an era where the theoretical marvels of quantum mechanics transition from laboratory curiosities to indispensable tools for real-world problem-solving. The journey to quantum supremacy has just taken a giant leap towards tangible reality, thanks to the ingenuity and collaborative spirit of Diraq and imec.
