Google reveals Willow, a new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip

Google announced Willow, its new quantum computing chip that delivers state-of-the-art performance across several metrics. Google believes that this new Willow chip is a major step on its decade-long journey in quantum computing.

With 105 qubits, Willow has achieved best-in-class performance in both quantum error correction and random circuit sampling. Google claims that its new breakthrough in Willow can reduce errors exponentially as it scales up using more qubits.

This new Willow chip was fabricated in Google's new state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Santa Barbara, built from the ground up for building quantum chips. Google optimized several aspects, including chip architecture, fabrication, gate development, calibration, and more, to achieve improved performance.

Google highlighted that Willow solved a standard benchmark test in less than 5 minutes. A leading current-generation supercomputer would require over 10^25 years to solve the same test. A quantum computer will be beneficial in several practical applications in areas like drug discovery, fusion energy, and others. To help achieve this, Google mentioned that it is optimistic that the Willow generation of chips can bring those applications to reality.

Here's how Google described its breakthrough achievement in Quantum Computing:

Today in Nature, we published results showing that the more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes. We tested ever-larger arrays of physical qubits, scaling up from a grid of 3x3 encoded qubits, to a grid of 5x5, to a grid of 7x7 — and each time, using our latest advances in quantum error correction, we were able to cut the error rate in half. In other words, we achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate.

This historic accomplishment is known in the field as “below threshold” — being able to drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits. You must demonstrate being below threshold to show real progress on error correction, and this has been an outstanding challenge since quantum error correction was introduced by Peter Shor in 1995.

Willow's breakthrough performance brings us closer to realizing the full potential of quantum computing. Recently, Microsoft announced a new partnership through which it is trying to create the most powerful quantum machine ever. You can read more about it here.