IOP Business Innovation Award: Oxford Ionics
For the development of quantum computers with electronic qubit control and scalable architecture that enables world-leading performance with chips that can be manufactured at scale on standard semiconductor production lines.
Designing architectures for quantum computing is hard because three things must be achieved:
Extremely low gate error rates that stay low as the number of qubits increases.
Parallel qubit control - the ability to perform different operations on all of the qubits at the same time.
The exclusive use of technologies that can be built at scale and integrated into a single device.
There are many architectures which solve one or two of these challenges but none has yet achieved all three simultaneously. Oxford Ionics has demonstrated a way of controlling qubits that can.
The best error rates have been demonstrated with trapped ion qubits, but these typically require lasers to drive the quantum operations, which are challenging to integrate. Oxford Ionics’ unique electronic qubit control system allows them to trap and control ions above the surface of the chip and build out large scale chips. They have achieved record-setting qubit control fidelities while maintaining the scalability of the architecture of their systems which can be built in the same semiconductor foundries as chips for laptops and data centres.
To date, they have established key partnerships in the industry in order to tackle real-world challenges in various fields, such as catalytic science.
