Microsoft has announced the Majorana 1 quantum chip, based on a topological core architecture, which is a significant step towards practical quantum computing.
Microsoft has announced the Majorana 1 quantum chip, based on a topological core architecture, which is a significant step towards practical quantum computing.
The company claims that Majorana 1 can scale to support millions of quantum bits (qubits) on a single chip.
Unlike digital bits, which have two possible states, one and zero, qubits can be zero, one or a quantum superposition of zero and one, representing a potentially infinite set of states up until the moment of measurement. Theoretically, quantum computing could enable calculations that would be impractical for classical computers if existing barriers, such as the need for quantum error correction, can be overcome, The Register writes .
This error correction requires many times more physical qubits—a two-state quantum system bound to hardware—than logical qubits—high-level abstractions used for programming.
Commercially useful quantum computers are expected to require millions of physical qubits, but that’s still a long way off. Google’s Willow chip, unveiled last December, boasts 105 physical qubits. While the number of qubits in devices using different technologies can’t be directly compared—IBM’s Osprey, due in 2022, is equipped with a 433-qubit processor—they’re still orders of magnitude short of the millions.
Microsoft claims that Majorana 1 is getting closer to a million qubits, which could happen in the coming years, not decades.
“Whatever you do in the quantum space, you have to have a path to a million qubits,” Chetan Nayak, a technical scientist at Microsoft, said in a statement. “If you don’t, you’re going to hit a wall before you get to the scale where you can solve really important problems. We’ve actually developed a path to a million.”
Microsoft currently has eight topological qubits, which is how many there are on its breakthrough chip. But it has the potential to scale to millions.
The Majorana 1 chip is based on what Microsoft calls a topological core, meaning it's built from a material called a topological superconductor, or topoconductor, which creates a new state of matter, a topological state that is neither solid, liquid, nor gaseous.
Instead of silicon, the chip is made of indium arsenide, which is used to detect infrared light and is superconducting in extreme cold.
With the Majorana 1 chip, Microsoft can build quantum computers running on topological qubits that require less error correction and are therefore more physically scalable than alternative approaches. Rather than building a football field-sized machine to house millions of qubits, Microsoft's Majorana 1 chip is designed to fit in Azure data centers.
