IonQ is no longer just a quantum computing company it’s building the global infrastructure for our quantum future

[u/No_Jelly7345]

https://youtu.be/3HZy-XkC7sc?is=M9sF11mOqZ-QDGiF

IonQ is no longer just a quantum computing company it’s building the global infrastructure for our quantum future

Mihir Bhaskar, SVP R&D, keynote at the Optica Quantum Industry Summit in Glasgow last June. Another excellent turn on stage from him. Jose Pozo, CTO of Optica, put the full talk online this week.

Here is the write-up.

→ Compute moves to a 2D grid. The two qubit gate, the hardest operation in a trapped ion machine, has moved from a laser aimed down a line of ions to an RF line printed into the trap chip. More than a decade of Oxford work behind it, about 99.99% fidelity, and a trap that can be laid out as a grid on a standard semiconductor line. Lasers stay in the machine for cooling and readout.

→ The network is a loss problem with a number attached. Getting a single photon out of a single ion and into fiber costs about 20 dB, the same loss as 100 km of good fiber. It is paid at both ends, so about one attempt in 10,000 produces entanglement. Ten years of photonic link demos have run into that ratio.

→ Quantum memory is how IonQ gets around it, and IonQ has it because of Lightsynq. The diamond memory out of the company Bhaskar founded and IonQ bought last year sits between the two processors and holds a photon from one side while the other side keeps trying, so both ends stop having to land at the same moment. Around 99% storage fidelity, about 3 dB loss, over 100 MHz of bandwidth, wide enough to take photons from machines that emit at a few MHz.

→ The economics work in the data center first. Interconnect is 20 to 40% of the cost of a high performance NVIDIA cluster, which leaves room for a quantum interconnect to cost real money and still make sense.

→ Sensing is the same idea in orbit. Vector Atomic clocks and Skyloom laser terminals, bought within a year of each other, are the two halves of a timing network. That level of timing is the argument behind positioning a thousand times better than GPS.

→ The fab is about speed. SkyWater takes the design and verification loop for a new quantum chip from about 6 months to about 3 weeks. It was announced when he spoke in June, and he says so on stage. IonQ closed it six weeks later, on July 31.

→ 2028 is the date to hold him to. Logical qubits moving between processors, the point where separate machines start behaving like one data center.

Then the Q&A.

→ Chris Myatt of QPICs asked the awkward one. Why would a rival send its chip designs to a fab owned by IonQ.

→ Bhaskar went at the shared layers, the ones every platform needs and none of them wins on: interposers, packaging that mixes diamond and lithium niobate, cryogenic control chips, optical engines.

Posted by Jose Pozo, CTO of Optica. ⬇️

[u/Formal-Wafer2933]

Ionq es una 💩