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.
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