Technology
Useful quantum computers now – but how?
While a fully fault tolerant, universally programmable quantum computer (FTQC) would be an amazing device that would truly disrupt our society and economy, it is still very far away. We estimate that the number of physical qubits for useful applications would need to be in the order of 20 to 100 million. At the same time, the quality of the qubits (often dubbed fidelity) would need to be drastically increased to allow complex algorithms and real-world problems to be solved. Assuming that we continue to see a quantum version of „Moore’s law“ with a doubling of the number of qubits every 12-24 months, it would still take humanity more than 15 years for this threshold to be met based on the 50 to 100 qubits we are at right now.
Kipu Quantum’s team is driven by the mission of productizing today’s available quantum computing hardware to create something of value for customers right now. To do so requires finding technical solutions to bridge a performance gap of orders of magnitude in number and fidelity of qubits. The solution is to design application specific solutions that use existing hardware in a problem-specific way to best by-pass their short-comings. At the same time, we employ specific algorithm-related concepts, which make them much more compact, which reduces over-head and allows them to be useful with noisy, small-scale hardware.
This is enabled by three concepts, which have been pioneered by our co-founder and CEO Prof. Dr. Enrique (Kike) Solano in the past decade. With its industrial and commercial collaborators, Kipu Quantum works to hard to further develop and patent them to the benefit of our customers.
Kipus mission
Design and productize useful machines
by going multiplatform and modular
single hardware concept
large-scale chips
to lower the bar even further.
single hardware concept
In the foreseable future, we a expect co-existance of several hardware concepts to realize qubits – like superconducting circuits, ion traps, photonic modes, neutral atoms, NV centers, electrons on Helium and spin qubits. Kipu will partner up with leading single-platform qubit developers, each having specific benefits and shortcomings, to pick the best platform to solve our customer’s specific business problems.
While will be concerned to solve problems with the intermediate-state quantum cores our suppliers will provide on their trajectory towards FTQC, they will be able to focus on increasing the performance on a chip level to get us to hundreds of millions high-fidelity qubits.
large-scale chips
Kipu will mainly focus on quantum cores with low number of noisy qubits as building blocks, allowing a modular combination in the spirit of building blocks.
Coupling existing few qubit chips in modules is versatile, faster, and cost-efficient.
to lower the bar even further.
In the spirit of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS) from classical computing, we perform adjustment steps on the algorithm level, to make them more robust, as well as on the chip level, to optimize the arrangement of qubits for specific cases.
To do so requires a paradigm-shift from the conventional analog quantum computers to involve digital elements.