Microsoft Announces Quantum Breakthrough, New Processor

Microsoft today announced Majorana 1, a Quantum processing unit (QPU) that it says is powered by topological qubits.

“Quantum computers promise to transform science and society–but only after they achieve the scale that once seemed distant and elusive, and their reliability is ensured by quantum error correction,” Microsoft Technical Fellow and corporate vice president Chetan Nayak explains. “Today, we’re announcing rapid advancements on the path to useful quantum computing.”

It’s been a while since Microsoft made a big splash with Quantum computing. You may recall that the software giant headlined its Ignite 2017 event with a Microsoft Quantum Computing initiative. I barely understood the topic then, despite meeting with the team, who tried their best. And I barely understand it now. So here goes.

Quantum computers will forgo the standard bits used by today’s traditional computers–which store data as a 1 or 0–and instead use quantum bits, or qubits to store a far more complex array of information. Each qubit added to a quantum computer will double its performance, and while the scaling potential there is obviously incredible, quantum computers get less and less stable as they scale. Microsoft’s solution to this problem, then as now, is what it calls a topological qubit.

Today’s new concerns a breakthrough related to topological qubits: Microsoft has created its first topoconductor, which is based on topological superconductivity, a previously theoretical “revolutionary class of materials” made from indium arsenide (a semiconductor) and aluminum (superconductor) that form topological superconducting nanowires when cooled to near absolute zero and tuned with magnetic fields. The result is “impressive stability,” Microsoft says, adding that it was not surprised to discover that quantum computing required it to create a new state of matter.

I know.

Long story short, this breakthrough marks the completion of the second milestone in Microsoft’s quantum computer roadmap, which is to create a hardware-protected (topological) qubit, that is, a qubit that can scale reliably. And the firm says it will now be able to build a fault-tolerant prototype of a quantum computer in years, not decades.

Tied to this, Microsoft today announced Majorana 1, its first quantum processor. Majorana 1 utilizes a topological core architecture that Microsoft says will help it scale to one million qubits on a single chip that can fit in the palm of a hand, with “trillions of fast and reliable operations.” That theoretical future supercomputer will be more powerful than all the world’s computers today, combined, Microsoft says. And it validates its Microsoft’s choice to pursue the topological qubit design years ago.