Qubit Transistors Reach Error Correction Benchmark

A team in Australia has recently demonstrated a key advance in metal-oxide-semiconductor-based (or MOS-based) quantum computers. They showed that their two-qubit gates—logical operations that involve more than one quantum bit, or qubit—perform without errors 99 percent of the time. This number is important, because it is the baseline necessary to perform error correction, which is believed to be necessary to build a large-scale quantum computer. What’s more, these MOS-based quantum computers are compatible with existing CMOS technology, which will make it more straightforward to manufacture a large number of qubits on a single chip than with other techniques.

“Getting over 99 percent is significant because that is considered by many to be the error correction threshold, in the sense that if your fidelity is lower than 99 percent, it doesn’t really matter what you’re going to do in error correction,” says Yuval Boger, CCO of quantum computing company QuEra and who wasn’t involved in the work. “You’re never going to fix errors faster than they accumulate.”

There are many contending platforms in the race to build a useful quantum computer. IBM, Google and others are building their machines out of superconducting qubits. Quantinuum and IonQ use individual trapped ions. QuEra and Atom Computing use neutrally-charged atoms. Xanadu and PsiQuantum are betting on photons. The list goes on.

In the new result, a collaboration between the University of New South Whales (UNSW) and Sydney-based startup Diraq, with contributors from Japan, Germany, Canada, and the U.S., has taken yet another approach: trapping single electrons in MOS devices. “What we are trying to do is we are trying to make qubits that are as close to traditional transistors as they can be,” says Tuomo Tanttu, a research fellow at UNSW who led the effort.

Qubits That Act Like Transistors

These qubits are indeed very similar to a regular transistor, gated in such a way as to have only a single electron in the channel. The biggest advantage of this approach is that it can be manufactured using traditional CMOS technologies, making it theoretically possible to scale to millions of qubits on a single chip. Another advantage is that MOS qubits can be integrated on-chip with standard transistors for simplified input, output, and control, says Diraq CEO Andrew Dzurak.

The drawback of this approach, however, is that MOS qubits have historically suffered from device-to-device variability, causing significant noise on the qubits.

“The sensitivity in [MOS] qubits is going to be more than in transistors, because in transistors, you still have 20, 30, 40 electrons carrying the current. In a qubit device, you’re really down to a single electron,” says Ravi Pillarisetty, a senior device engineer for Intel quantum hardware who wasn’t involved in the work.

The team’s result not only demonstrated the 99 percent accurate functionality on two-qubit gates of the test devices, but also helped better understand the sources of device-to-device variability. The team tested three devices with three qubits each. In addition to measuring the error rate, they also performed comprehensive studies to glean the underlying physical mechanisms that contribute to noise.

The researchers found that one of the sources of noise was isotopic impurities in the silicon layer, which, when controlled, greatly reduced the circuit complexity necessary to run the device. The next leading cause of noise was small variations in electric fields, likely due to imperfections in the oxide layer of the device. Tanttu says this should be straightforward to improve by transitioning from a laboratory clean room to a foundry environment.

“It’s a great result and great progress. And I think it’s setting the right direction for the community in terms of thinking less about one individual device, or demonstrating something on an individual device, versus thinking more longer term about the scaling path,” Pillarisetty says.

Now, the challenge will be to scale up these devices to more qubits. One difficulty with scaling is the number of input/output channels required. The quantum team at Intel, who are pursuing a similar technology, has recently pioneered a chip they call Pando Tree to try to address this issue. Pando Tree will be on the same substrate as the quantum processor, enabling faster inputs and outputs to the qubits. The Intel team hopes to use it to scale to thousands of qubits. “A lot of our approach is thinking about, how do we make our qubit processor look more like a modern CPU?” says Pillarisetty.

Similarly, Diraq CEO Dzurak says his team plan to scale their technology to thousands of qubits in the near future through a recently announced partnership with Global Foundries. “With Global Foundries, we designed a chip that will have thousands of these [MOS qubits]. And these will be interconnected by using classical transistor circuitry that we designed. This is unprecedented in the quantum computing world,” Dzurak says.