Elodie Collins
IBM Quantum has set out a roadmap to build the world’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.
The technology company said Tuesday that IBM Quantum Starling will be able to perform 20,000 times more operations compared to current quantum computers.
“IBM is charting the next frontier in quantum computing,” stated Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO at IBM. “Our expertise across mathematics, physics, and engineering is paving the way for a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer — one that will solve real-world challenges and unlock immense possibilities for business.”
How to Build a Quantum Computer
The roadmap marks key technology milestones with a series of processors and adapters, each named after a bird, that will be needed to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
The first milestone, expected to arrive in the coming months, is named Quantum Loon and refers to a chip designed to test architecture components for the quantum low-density parity check, or qLDPC, codes. QLDPC reduces the number of physical qubits needed to correct errors and lowers overhead by approximately 90 percent versus other similar codes.
By 2026, IBM plans to launch Quantum Kookaburra, a modular processor for storing and processing encoded information. According to the company, Kookaburra will combine quantum memory and logic operations.
Finally, Quantum Cockatoo is scheduled to arrive in 2027. The system will “entangle two Kookaburra modules,” allowing the quantum chips to function like nodes in a larger architecture.
IBM will house Quantum Starling at its new data center in Poughkeepsie, New York.
IBM is not the only technology company advancing quantum computing. In February, Microsoft announced Majorana 1, a new quantum processing unit that can be used to build fault-tolerant quantum computing prototypes.
