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AWS unveils Ocelot chip, aims to cut quantum computing

timeline

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Ocelot uses 'cat' qubits, reducing needed physical qubits

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AWS aims for as few as 100,000 qubits for useful quantum

computers

By Stephen Nellis

Feb 27 (Reuters) - Amazon Web Services on Thursday

showed a quantum computing chip with new technology that it

hopes will shave as much as five years off its effort to build a

commercially useful quantum computer.

The chip, named Ocelot, is a prototype that has only a tiny

fraction of the computing power needed to create a useful

machine. But like its tech rivals, AWS, which is Amazon.com's ( AMZN )

cloud computing unit, believes it has finally hit on a

technology that can be scaled up into a working machine, though

it has not yet set a date for when it will reach that point.

The AWS announcement, which coincides with the publication

of a peer-reviewed paper in the scientific journal Nature, comes

as quantum computing is sweeping through the technology world,

with Alphabet's Google, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and startup

PsiQuantum all announcing advances in recent months.

Quantum computers hold the promise of carrying out

computations that would take conventional computers millions of

years and could help scientists develop new materials such as

batteries and new drugs. But a fundamental building block of

quantum computers called a qubit is fast but finicky and prone

to errors.

Scientists established in the 1990s that some of a quantum

computer's qubits could be dedicated to correcting those errors,

and the years since then have been spent searching for ways to

construct physical qubits so that enough "logical" qubits are

left over to do useful computing work.

The standard industry thinking has been that a chip will

need about a million physical qubits to yield a useful number of

logical qubits.

But AWS said it had built a prototype chip that uses only

nine physical qubits to yield one working logical qubit, thanks

to the use of what is known as a "cat" qubit, so named for

physicist Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment to

illustrate principles of quantum mechanics in which an unlucky

cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time.

Oskar Painter, AWS director of quantum hardware, said the

AWS approach could one day yield useful computers with only

100,000 qubits rather than a million.

"It should allow us to provide between five and 10 times

lower numbers of physical qubits to implement the error

correction in a fully scaled machine. So that's the real

benefit," Painter told Reuters.

Painter said that the current chip was constructed using

standard techniques borrowed from the chip industry and a

material called tantalum, but that AWS and partners hope to

customize those techniques further.

"That's where I think there's going to be a huge amount of

innovation and that will be the thing that could really reel in

timelines for development. If we make improvements at the

materials and processing level, this will make the underlying

technology just much simpler," Painter said.