Duality Quantum Technologies is building a photonic quantum processing unit called VELOX-QP—a chip that uses light to perform quantum operations—and plans to manufacture it at their Southampton nanofabrication site before assembling and testing it in Bristol. Quantum computers promise to solve problems that classical computers cannot, but the quantum states that give them their power are fragile and easily destroyed by environmental noise. Building hardware that can detect and correct errors in real time, and that can link multiple processors together into a scalable system, is the central engineering challenge. VELOX-QP is designed as a testbed to tackle both: it packs ultrafast quantum logic gates onto a chip using wafer-scale nanofabrication, and its low-loss optical coupling allows quantum states to be transmitted between chips via a quantum router developed at the University of Bristol. If successful, VELOX-QP will give industrial users—including systems engineers at the UK Atomic Energy Authority and quantum computer scientists at Digital Catapult—a working platform to trial quantum algorithms and error-correction techniques. That could accelerate the development of fault-tolerant quantum computers, which in turn might one day transform fields from materials design to energy grid optimisation. For now, the project is a fundamental engineering step toward modular, scalable quantum hardware, not a product with immediate consumer applications.
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Based on quantum mechanics, which is our most fundamental description of the universe, quantum computers represent a boundary for what can be computed, simulated, and modelled. Yet down at this microscopic level, physical systems are fragile, unstable, and quickly degrade to produce our familiar and predictable classical world. Building hardware that avoids this quantum information loss, and which can instead grow and protect quantum information, is a defining challenge of our age. To meet this challenge, we need to build quantum operations that can rapidly detect and correct errors, and we need to be able to connect many quantum processing units together, so that we can scale up quantum computing power. Duality's integrated photonics technology has been designed based on these needs. We have developed proprietary wafer-scale nanofabrication techniques that allow ultrafast quantum logic gates to be densely packed into photonic quantum information processing chips. Our In/Out coupling technology allows the low loss transmission of quantum states of light, which together with the University of Bristol's quantum router, supports multi-chip networking and modular architectures to scale up quantum computing power. In this project, Duality will design, make and commission a photonic quantum processing unit (QPU) called VELOX-QP that serves as a quantum computing testbed, and as a building block for a future networked modular architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computing. VELOX-QP will support a range of different quantum algorithms operated by industrial end users, including Systems Engineers at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), and quantum professionals such as computer scientists at the Digital Catapult who are interested in trialing quantum error correction techniques. VELOX-QP will be manufactured at Duality's Southampton nano-fabrication site, and assembled and operated at Duality's Bristol laboratories. This project brings together a powerful combination of skills across hardware, quantum computing and communications, industrial systems engineering and applications. Duality has deep experience of full stack design and fabrication of photonic quantum hardware; CSA Catapult has valuable expertise in hardware testing and verification; BT and the University of Bristol's High Performance Networks group bring know-how in quantum networking hardware and infrastructure. The end use cases brought by UKAEA and Digital Catapult will help to open up quantum computing hardware to a wider user base. Ultimately, the full utility of quantum computing will be discovered by connecting it with creative minds from industry to the arts, and that broad usage is a crucial motivator for the quantum computing testbed.
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