Chinese Startup Advancing Technology For Quantum Computing Chips

Engineers from the 2017-founded startup Origin Quantum are hard at work testing products at China’s first trial quantum chip production line in Hefei, Anhui province.

Chinese Startup Advancing Technology For Quantum Computing Chips
A Chinese company is working hard to perfect its technologies in quantum computing chips, the next strategic frontier where major economies are frantically trying to establish a beachhead, despite Washington’s increasingly strict chip export restrictions on China.

Engineers from the 2017-founded startup Origin Quantum are hard at work testing products at China’s first trial quantum chip production line in Hefei, Anhui province.

The processor for quantum computers is a quantum computing chip. These cutting-edge chips are outfitted with “qubits,” which are the distinguishing feature of quantum computing over traditional computing. A qubit can have a value that is either 0, 1, or a quantum superposition of 0 and 1. In contrast, a classical computing bit can only have a value of 0 or 1.

As a result, some equations and algorithms can be processed by quantum computers exponentially more quickly than by traditional computers. A quantum computer’s power increases with the number of qubits it has, according to Jia Zhilong, vice president of Origin Quantum.

Jia reported that in January 2022, a production line for superconductor chips went into operation. 1,500 batches of chip products have been produced so far. To speed up the production of quantum computers on the assembly line, more innovative tools have been created. Origin Quantum created the NDPT-100 in December, which is the nation’s first platform for non-destructive electrical probing.

The platform, which is quick and precise, acts as a keen “eye” to gauge qubit resistance and can almost completely damage-freely assess the quality of quantum chips, greatly enhancing the efficiency of development.

Wukong will have a chip with more than 64 qubits, claims Jia.” The debugging process for the quantum chip made especially for Wukong is currently underway. Wukong, our most recent quantum computer, will be released in six months,” Jia added.

According to Dou Menghan, deputy director of the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center, calculations that would take the fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to process would take a 53-qubit quantum computer 200 seconds to process.

Dou stated that quantum computers are capable of resolving issues that traditional computers struggle with in fields like artificial intelligence, pharmaceuticals, and finance.

China Mobile, the largest telecom provider in the world with 956 million mobile subscribers, and Origin Quantum signed a partnership agreement last year to investigate how to use quantum computing to get around the computational bottlenecks that are faced by 5G and 6G technologies.

Currently, quantum computing is only used on a small scale, but by 2030, companies like Google, IBM, and Origin Quantum plan to commercialize quantum computing on a large scale.

By 2035, the global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. projects that quantum computing will have a conservatively estimated value of up to $700 billion for sectors like finance, chemicals, automobiles, and pharmaceuticals.

In its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–25), China declared that it would hasten the development of cutting-edge scientific and technological concepts like quantum computing and quantum communication. Origin

According to the most recent Global Quantum Computing Technology Patent Filings Ranking List, which was published in October by innovation index researcher incoPat and intellectual property media IPR Daily, Quantum is ranked first in China and sixth in the world by the number of invention patents it has applied for.