At the Quantum World Congress event, Quantinuum has unveiled its quantum processor development roadmap, with a goal of providing systems that can provide users with a quantum advantage in the next few years. Their roadmap builds upon the continued progress they have made with the H1 and H2 generations of processors and the roadmap extends for three more generations through 2029.
Quantinuum has a demonstrated track record over several years of continuing to increase qubit count and qubit fidelity starting with the original H0 processor introduced in 2019. Going forward, they are building upon the latest results of their 56 qubit H2 processor including the expansion of the H2 from 32 to 56 trapped ion qubits and an improvement of the two-qubit gate fidelity to close to 99.9%. They will also be leveraging their work in error correction codes as shown by their work with the University of Colorado Boulder and Microsoft. They have just announced a demonstration they performed with Microsoft to create 12 logical qubits on the H2 processor shows a circuit error rate improvements of up to 22 times over a corresponding physical error rate for the circuit.
Going forward, Quantinuum’s next system, slated for introduction in 2025, is called Helios. It will increase the qubit count to 96 qubits and provide a further improvement in physical error rate by a factor of 2 to under 5×10-4. With error correction, this system should provide 50 logical qubits with a logical error rate around 10-4. As shown in the picture above, Helios has an interesting topology that looks somewhat like a two-pronged fork.
Things get interesting in 2027 with the introduction of the fourth generation Sol device. The previous generations had the qubits lined up in a linear arrangement, but with Sol, they will be introducing a 2D grid topology. (See our article here that describes some of the technical developments Quantinuum is working on to achieve this.) The Sol device will a doubling of the number of qubits to 192 and a further decrease in the physical error rate by over a factor of two to 2×10-4. The result will be a system that they indicate will provide about 100 logical qubits with a logical error rate in the 10-5 range.
The final system named Apollo is planned for the 2029 time frame. It will extend the technology to contain thousands of qubits and another decrease of the physical error rate by a factor of two to 10-4. This should create a system that will have 100’s of logical qubits with logical error rates between 1×10-5 to 1×10-10. The company mentions that it is investigating various novel error correction codes that may provide significant improvements in efficiency and performance.
For more about Quantinuum’s announcement, you can view a press release provided by the company here and a blog post about their roadmap here. and a technical perspective blog post about it here. Also, you can see another article we have just posted that describes their error correction work with Microsoft here.
September 10, 2024
