UNSW Sydney nano-tech startup Diraq has shown its quantum chips aren't just lab-perfect prototypes - they also hold up in real-world production, maintaining the 99% accuracy needed to make quantum computers viable.
Diraq, a pioneer of silicon-based quantum computing, achieved this feat by teaming up with European nanoelectronics institute Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (imec). Together they demonstrated the chips worked just as reliably coming off a semiconductor chip fabrication line as they do in the experimental conditions of a research lab at UNSW.
UNSW Engineering Professor Andrew Dzurak, who is the founder and CEO of Diraq, said up until now 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."
In a paper published on Sept. 24 in Nature, the teams report that Diraq-designed, imec-fabricated devices achieved over 99% fidelity in operations involving two quantum bits - or 'qubits'. The result is a crucial step towards Diraq's quantum processors achieving utility scale, the point at which a quantum computer's commercial value exceeds its operational cost. This is the key metric set out in the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program run by the United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to gauge whether Diraq and 17 other companies can reach this goal.
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