Microsoft expects to build a quantum supercomputer within ten years

Microsoft has shared its roadmap for quantum computers. The company expects to build a quantum supercomputer within ten years. The company will do this on the basis of the Majorana qubits that the company has been researching for some time.

Microsoft’s quantum roadmap consists of six facets, like this the company writes in a technical blog post. The planning starts with creating and controlling the majorana particles. The tech giant already achieved a breakthrough with this last year, when the company managed to develop devices for the first time with which they could generate a ‘topological phase of matter’ surrounded by two majoran zero modes. Such particles do not exist in nature and only appear under specific conditions. Majorana qubits are relatively stable, but difficult to produce.

In a peer-reviewed research paper A year later, Microsoft stated that this breakthrough was the first step towards a quantum supercomputer. In the coming years, the company hopes to achieve several more milestones in the build-up to a supercomputer based on qubits, which, according to the tech giant, should be able to perform certain calculations faster than traditional computer systems.

The next step is to develop qubits with hardware protection, the company writes. Such quantum bits therefore have built-in protection against errors and should make it possible to further scale quantum computers. According to the tech giant, these qubits will each be less than 10 microns small on a side. Each operation of such a qubit must also take less than a microsecond. Digital voltage pulses prevent the qubits from having high error rates.

In the subsequent steps, Microsoft wants to make the qubits in question more reliable and resilient and eventually combine them into a system of several smaller qubits. For example, the company wants to ‘entangle’ the hardware-protected qubits with a process called ‘braiding‘. This should ensure lower error rates. The final step is to build a quantum supercomputer. Microsoft tells TechCrunch that the company expects to build such a system within ten years. “We’re thinking about our roadmap and time to the quantum supercomputer in terms of years rather than decades,” Microsoft Vice President Krysta Svore told that tech website.