For years, the quantum computing news cycle was dominated by headlines about record-setting systems. Researchers at Google and IBM had spit about who achieved what—and whether it was worth the effort. But the time to argue over who has the biggest processors seems to have passed: companies are preparing for real-world life. Suddenly, everyone was behaving like grown-ups.
As if to emphasize how much the researchers wanted to get off the ship of hype, IBM expected to announce processor in 2023 that brings with it a tendency to bring more quantum bits, or “qubits,” into play. Qubits, the processing unit of quantum computers, can be built from a variety of technologies, including superconducting circuits, trapped ions, and photons, the quantum particles of light.
IBM has long pursued superconducting qubits, and over the years the company has made steady progress in increasing the number of qubits it can pack on a chip. For example, in 2021, IBM announced one with a record number of 127 units. In November it came out Osprey 433-qubit processorand the company aims to release a 1,121 qubit processor called Condor by 2023.
But this year IBM is also expected to launch the Heron processor, which has only 133 qubits. It may look like a step backwards, but as the company wants to point out, Heron’s qubits will be of the highest quality. And importantly, each chip will be able to connect directly to other Heron processors, heralding the shift from single quantum computing chips to “modular” quantum computers built around the world. built from multiple interconnected processors—a move that is expected to greatly scale up quantum computers.
Heron is the signal of larger changes in quantum computing. Thanks to some recent breakthroughs, active roadmaps and high levels of funding, we could see general-purpose quantum computers sooner than many predicted just a few years ago, some experts suggest. “Overall, things are definitely progressing at breakneck speed,” said Michele Mosca, deputy director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo.
Here are a few areas where professionals expect to see progress.
Chaining quantum computers together
IBM’s Project Heron is just the first step in the world of modular quantum computing. These chips will be connected to common electronics, so they won’t be able to maintain the “quantum” of information as it moves from one processor to another. But the hope is that such chips, eventually linked together by quantum-friendly microwave or fiber-optic connections, will pave the way for large-scale, distributed quantum computers with up to one million qubits connected. That’s probably the amount needed to run useful, error-corrected quantum algorithms. “We need technologies that scale in both scale and cost, so modularity is key,” said Jerry Chow, Director of Quantum Hardware Systems Development at IBM.
