Xanadu has announced a new quantum computing system called Aurora that is contained in four room temperature laser and compute racks along with a cryogenically cooled photon detection system. The system provides 84 squeezed state qubits and 12 physical qubits all connected together with 13 km of fiber optic cable. Aurora is a follow-on to previous generations of Xanadu device including the X8 and Borealis. One of the big advantages of using photonic based qubits is that it make it easy to implement photonic networking to connect multiple modules together.
The four rack as shown in the picture above includes one rack for the input laser systems and three racks for the compute modules. Inside the compute modules are five different photonic component subsystems that provide Sources, Buffering, Refinery, Routing, and QPU functions.
The system uses an optical GKP approach which has an advantage over other photonic systems, because most of the hardware can run at room temperature. Only one portion of the system needed to herald certain input states at the qubit preparation stage needs to be cryogenically cooled and would only take up about 10% of the space in a future large scale data center. This could provide significant energy an operational savings versus other photonic and non-photonic systems.
With the Aurora system, the company shows it has made major progress in development of the scalability, networkability, and modularity needed for implementing a very large quantum data center containing thousands of individual modules. The next big challenge they are working on is to reduce optical loss in order to surpass the fault tolerance threshold where error correction codes start becoming effective. The company has indicated that to achieve this they will be focusing on working with their foundry partners to customize the fabrication processes and chip design to improve device performance for their specific application. Their current result with Aurora was based upon devices that were built with commercially available fabrication platforms. The company has longer term plans to start building a full-size quantum data center in Toronto in 2029.
For more about Aurora, you can visit a press release issued by the company here, read a blog article that provides additional information about the design here, view a short video about Aurora here, and access a detailed technical paper published in Nature titled Scaling and networking a modular photonic quantum computer.
January 22, 2025
