Quantum-computing startup Rigetti to offer modular processors

Enlarge / It may look nearly featureless, but it's meant to contain 80 qubits. (credit: Rigetti Computing)

A quantum-computing startup announced Tuesday that its future quantum processor designs will differ significantly from its current offerings. Rather than building a monolithic processor as everyone else has, Rigetti Computing will build smaller collections of qubits on chips that can be physically linked together into a single functional processor. This isn't multiprocessing so much as modular chip design.

The move is consequential for both Rigetti processors and quantum computing more generally.

What's holding things back

Rigetti's computers rely on a technology called a "transmon," which is based on a superconducting wire loop linked to a resonator. It's the same qubit technology used by large competitors like Google and IBM. The state of one transmon can influence that of its neighbors during calculations, an essential feature of quantum computing. To an extent, the topology of connections among transmon qubits is a key contributor to the machine's computational power.

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