Quantum News Nexus

It’s November, and that means a big update from Big Blue on its latest quantum chips and roadmap progress. IBM, at its annual Quantum Developers Conference, unveiled the anticipated IBM Nighthawk QPU, featuring “120 qubits linked together with 218 next-generation tunable couplers to their four nearest neighbors in a square lattice,” according to an IBM press release.

The release further states that this represents more than 20% more couplers than IBM’s previous Heron chip, which was announced at last year’s conference. Nighthawk will be delivered to IBM users by the end of this year.

IBM also said Nighthawk’s “increased qubit connectivity will allow users to accurately execute circuits with 30% more complexity than on IBM’s previous processor while maintaining low error rates,” and that the architecture will allow for the exploration of “more computationally demanding problems that require up to 5,000 two-qubit gates.”

The company also said future iterations of Nighthawk will deliver up to 7,500 gates by the end of 2026 and then up to 10,000 gates in 2027. This is one reason why, in a world of several different quantum computing architectures, some of them already available, superconducting quantum computers are worth waiting for. More gates means the ability to run more complex quantum algorithms to tackle more complex problems.

IBM also this week unveiled its IBM Loon experimental processor, which pushes error correction forward with new capabilities that include, according to the release, “multiple high-quality, low-loss routing layers to provide pathways for longer, on-chip connections (or “c-couplers”) that go beyond nearest-neighbor couplers and physically link distant qubits together on the same chip, as well as technologies to reset qubits between computations.”

There’s a lot more in the release, which I encourage you to read. In short, IBM expects verified quantum advantage by sometime next year, and also said primary fabrication of its quantum processor wafers is now happening at an advanced 300mm wafer fabrication facility at the Albany NanoTech Complex in New York. But, there’s even more, so check out that release.

IBM continues to be on track toward building a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.

Image: Nighthawk chip (Source: IBM)

 Quantum News Nexus is a new site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X @QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.