Entering the Quantum Race at this stage requires a new approach to have any chance of overhauling the current leaders, such as IBM and Google. Israeli startup QuamCore believes it has that new approach.
The seed funding was provided by Viola Ventures and Earth & Beyond Ventures, with Surround Ventures participating. QuamCore was founded in 2022 and is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel. It is led by Alon Cohen (co-founder and CEO); Shay Hacohen-Gourgy (CTO and a professor at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology); and Serge Rosenblum (chief scientist and an assistant professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science).
QuamCore’s secret sauce is a patented architecture that will allow the integration of 1 million qubits in a single cryostat. This is important since it solves one of the biggest problems in quantum scaling.
Superconducting qubits can only operate at near absolute zero. This means they need to be housed in special chambers known as cryostats (effectively a processing unit), with hugely complex and extensive cabling connecting the control electronics outside of the cryostat.
“Right now,” says QuamCore, “the most advanced quantum computers from IBM and Google can only fit about 5,000 qubits per cryostat, requiring hundreds of interconnected cryostats in a football-field-sized facility, to scale.” But QuamCore has developed an architecture that can house 1 million qubits in one cryostat measuring 55 cm x 52 cm x 28 cm (little more than the size of a desktop PC).
“The challenge in quantum computing isn’t just adding more qubits,” comments Cohen; “it’s how you scale without hitting fundamental barriers.” The first issue is to find a route to 1 million qubits; generally considered the minimum necessary for meaningful quantum computing.
“This required a radical rethinking of quantum processor architecture,” he continues. We explored multiple approaches and found a path that actually works – one that eliminates the core bottleneck preventing quantum computing from scaling.”
This doesn’t mean that quantum computers that can fit on a desk will be here next month. “At this stage, we have the design, architecture, and patents, and these have not yet transitioned into full production,” Cohen told SecurityWeek. So, the theory, and the patents, have not yet been tested in practice.
One issue that is yet unknown is how many of the 1 million physical qubits in a single cryostat will be consumed by error correction requirements to provide logical functioning qubits. But QuamCore is confident.
“Our design features one million physical qubits – currently transmon qubits, although our solution can accommodate any type of superconducting qubit,” explains Cohen. “We have specifically built our processor to run error-correcting, fault-tolerant quantum computations. We do not focus on NISQ systems [Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum; that is the generally accepted state of current quantum development].”
Instead, he continues, “We have pursued a fault-tolerant quantum computer with one million qubits… our error-correction algorithms are tightly integrated into the processor’s control system.”
Error correction, along with cryostat capacity, are the two big scaling problems. “Our error-correction algorithm is implemented through dedicated digital signals that directly apply single-qubit and two-qubit gates,” he expands. “Although this approach is similar to the analog methods used by IBM and Google, we instead transmit dedicated pulse trains – spectrally equivalent to analog signals – from inside the cryogenic environment at 10 millikelvin, rather than routing signals from room temperature for each qubit.”
It all still needs to be shown in practice at scale, but the theory and science have proven sufficient to persuade venture capital to invest the non-trivial sum of $9 million, believing that QuamCore may become a major player in the quantum race.
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