(MSPowerUser) Microsoft has announced that a team of Microsoft and University of Sydney researchers has developed forward-thinking hardware systems for quantum computers. This team has developed a cryogenic quantum control platform that uses specialized CMOS circuits to take digital inputs and generate many parallel qubit control signals.
The chip that powers this control platform is called Gooseberry. This team has also created the first-of-its-kind general-purpose cryo-compute core. This core does the classical computations needed to determine the instructions that are sent to Gooseberry which, in turn, feeds voltage pulses to the qubits.
This operates at around 2 Kelvin (K), a temperature that can be reached by immersing it in liquid Helium. Although this is still very cold, it is 20 times warmer than the temperatures at which Gooseberry operates and, therefore, 400 times as much cooling power is available. With the luxury of dissipating 400 times as much heat, the core is capable of general-purpose computing. Both visionary pieces of hardware are critical advances toward large-scale quantum computer processes and are the result of years of work.
Click here to read Microsoft research blog discussing the cryogenic quantum control platform.