Conveyor-belt superconducting quantum computer

The processing unit of a solid-state quantum computer consists in an array of coupled qubits, each locally driven with on-chip microwave lines that route carefully-engineered control signals to the qubits in order to perform logical operations. This approach to quantum computing comes with two major problems. On the one hand, it greatly hampers scalability towards fault-tolerant quantum computers, which are estimated to need a number of qubits — and, therefore driving lines — on the order of 106. On the other hand, these lines are a source of electromagnetic noise, exacerbating frequency crowding and crosstalk, while also contributing to power dissipation inside the dilution fridge. We here tackle these two overwhelming challenges by presenting a novel quantum processing unit (QPU) for a universal quantum computer which is globally (rather than locally) driven. Our QPU relies on a string of superconducting qubits with always-on ZZ interactions, enclosed into a closed geometry, which we dub „conveyor belt“. Strikingly, this architecture requires only (N) physical qubits to run a computation on N computational qubits, in contrast to previous (N2) proposals for global quantum computation. Additionally, universality is achieved via the implementation of single-qubit gates and a one-shot Toffoli gate. The ability to perform multi-qubit operations in a single step could vastly improve the fidelity and execution time of many algorithms.