Processors & Chips
The Benchmark Wars: Why Quantum Computers Can't Agree on a Yardstick
RafayelAsk a quantum computing company how good its machine is and you will get a number. The trouble is that no two companies quote the same number. One bra...
Circuit Knitting: Faking a Bigger Quantum Computer With Classical Glue
Every quantum processor has a hard ceiling: the number of qubits etched onto its chip. If your algorithm needs 40 qubits and your machine has 30, you...
The Transpiler: How Your Quantum Program Gets Rewritten Before It Runs
Write a quantum program and you are, in a sense, lying to yourself. You draw a tidy circuit with clean gates connecting any qubit to any other, using...
The Frequency Crowding Problem: When Qubits Run Out of Room on the Dial
Every fixed-frequency transmon on a superconducting quantum chip is a tiny resonator that answers to one particular pitch. Send in a microwave pulse a...
The Heavy-Hex Lattice: Why IBM Gave Its Qubits Fewer Neighbors
Look at a photograph of an IBM quantum processor and you will notice something odd about the pattern. The qubits are not packed into a tidy square gri...
The Native Gate Set: Every Quantum Computer Speaks Its Own Dialect
Ask a physicist to draw a quantum algorithm and you will get a tidy diagram of boxes and lines: a Hadamard here, a controlled-NOT there, a rotation so...
Dynamic Circuits: When a Quantum Computer Reads a Qubit Mid-Job
The textbook version of quantum computing goes like this: you prepare a batch of qubits, run a sequence of gates, and then measure everything at the e...
The Flip-Chip Stack: How Quantum Processors Went 3D
For years, a superconducting quantum processor was a fundamentally flat object. The qubits, the resonators that read them out, and the control lines t...
The Ion Shuttle: How Quantum Computers Move Atoms to Compute
Most pictures of a quantum computer show qubits fixed in place, wired up like transistors on a circuit board. Trapped-ion machines built on a design c...
The Yield Problem: Why Two Identical Qubits Don't Exist
Walk through any pitch about quantum computing and you will hear about qubit counts climbing into the hundreds and thousands. What you rarely hear is...
The SWAP Tax: When Qubits Can't Talk to Each Other
Picture a quantum processor as a small town where every qubit is a house, and the roads between houses are the only paths along which information can...
The Advantage Mirage: Has Any Quantum Computer Truly Beaten a Classical One?
Every few years a research team announces that a quantum processor has done something no classical computer can match. The headlines call it quantum s...