Briefs · Frontier Science
Quantum Computing's Biggest Problem Is Not the Qubits. It Is the Wires.
Quantum computing’s biggest problem is not the qubits. It is the wires.
D-Wave announced on 6 January what it calls an industry first: scalable, on-chip cryogenic control for gate-model qubits. The control electronics sit inside the cold, next to the qubits, instead of shouting instructions down a forest of cables from room temperature.
The demonstration used a multichip package: a high-coherence fluxonium qubit chip married to a multilayer control chip, joined by superconducting bump bonding and advanced cryogenic packaging. Key components were fabricated at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The payoff is wiring. D-Wave’s control technology, borrowed from its annealing machines, uses multiplexed digital-to-analog converters to control tens of thousands of qubits and couplers with just 200 bias wires. Fewer wires, no loss of fidelity: that is the claim, and it is the whole point.
Cold chips, clever control. Chief development officer Dr Trevor Lanting frames it as the step that lets gate-model machines scale the way annealing machines already have.
Conclusion: D-Wave is not selling more qubits, but rather fewer wires — and that is the harder problem.
Read the original at Fast Company
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