Amazon announces first-generation quantum chip Ocelot

Amazon announced Ocelot, its first-generation quantum chip. “Ocelot represents Amazon Web Services’ pioneering effort to develop, from the ground up, a hardware implementation of quantum error correction that is both resource efficient and scalable,” the company said. “Today in Nature, we published the results of our measurements on Ocelot, and its quantum error correction performance. Ocelot represents an important step on the road to practical quantum computers, leveraging chip-scale integration of cat qubits to form a scalable, hardware-efficient architecture for quantum error correction. In this approach, bit-flip errors are exponentially suppressed at the physical-qubit level; phase-flip errors are corrected using a repetition code, the simplest classical error-correcting code; and highly noise-biased controlled-NOT gates, between each cat qubit and ancillary transmon qubits, enable phase-flip-error detection while preserving the cat’s bit-flip protection.” Ocelot represents the company’s first chip with the cat qubit architecture, and an initial test of its suitability as a fundamental building block for implementing quantum error correction. Future versions of Ocelot are being developed that will exponentially drive down logical error rates, enabled by both an improvement in component performance and an increase in code distance. The company believes that Ocelot’s architecture, with its hardware-efficient approach to error correction, positions it well to tackle the next phase of quantum computing: learning how to scale. Using a hardware-efficient approach will allow us to more quickly and cost effectively achieve an error-corrected quantum computer that benefits society.