Intel will be applying their decades-old knowledge to the quantum world as well
Intel has announced their second wave of their Horse Ridge cryogenic control chip, and claims it to be another milestone in their path to overcome scalability, a major barrier in the world of quantum computing.
Horse Ridge II will be based on its predecessor. Jim Clarke, director of quantum hardware at Intel’s components research group said that the products they make have several iterations, and some of them have been designed after learning their first iteration properly. This way, they are not just improving, but also learning about how their qubits (quantum bits) should be controlled.
Horse Ridge II’s Components
While speaking to ZDNet about their new development, Clarke said that when they developed the initial controller, their focus was on being able to control a few different qubits, such as superconducting qubits and silicon qubits. Over the last couple of years however, Intel have moved away from superconducting qubits to a kind of qubit that looks like a transistor.
Clarke said that they are focused on silicon qubits and the second variation of Horse Ridge is suited for their silicon spin qubits.
About the Horse Ridge II, Intel says that it supports enhanced capabilities and higher levels of integration for elegant control of the quantum system. What’s new is that it can manipulate and read qubit states and control the ability of various gates that is required to connect multiple qubits. Horse Ridge II relies on the first-generation system-on-chip ability to create radio frequency pulses that can control the state of the qubit, known as qubit drive.
Intel is developing this so that they can stay ahead in quantum computing as well, by implementing the expertise they’ve gained from classical computing.
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