Quantum computer prototypes at China's first quantum chip production line. /CMG
China's first quantum chip production line made its debut via a live streaming program by China Media Group (CMG) on Tuesday, where Wukong, the country's latest quantum computer is to come out.
Quantum chips dedicated for Wukong had been developed at the production line by the end of last year, and are now debugging in the new quantum computer, said Jia Zhilong, deputy director of Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center, which is jointly established by Hefei Origin Quantum Computing Technology (Origin Quantum), a startup headquartered in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province and Key Laboratory of Quantum Information of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Part of China's latest quantum computer Wukong. /CMG
The country's latest quantum computer Wukong will feature a chip with over 64 qubits, Zhang Hui, manager of Origin Quantum, told guancha.cn in an interview, comparing to IBM's Osprey quantum processor with 433 qubits and Google's quantum chip Bristlecone with 72 qubits.
Zhang said the company lags behind the world's leading quantum computing players like IBM and Google in terms of hardware products and development, but has some advantages in the software and operating systems, and views the former as the way forward.
Sharp 'eye' and 'scalpel'
More cutting-edge tools have been developed to facilitate the production of quantum computers at the production line.
NDPT-100, China's first non-destructive probe electrical measurement platform, was developed by Origin Quantum in December, 2022.
Fast and accurate, the platform serves as a sharp eye to measure quantum bit resistance and can identify the quality of quantum chips with almost zero damage, greatly improving development efficiency.
MLLAS-100, China's first laser annealer. /CMG
The company built the country's first laser annealer in the following month. Dubbed "MLLAS-100," the laser annealer targets solving instability when the number of quantum bits increases.
It can achieve an ultra-high positioning accuracy of 100 nanometers and perform local laser annealing in a single quantum bit, enabling the quantum chip to expand to multiple bits.
Acting like a scalpel in surgery, it can accurately remove defects in quantum chips and improve production quality.
In the production process of quantum chips, the NDPT-100 platform is used to detect defective parts which will then be processed by the laser annealer, introduced by Jia. "With the pair cooperating with each other, quantum chips with higher quality are produced."
Based on an internal evaluation, "the yield of chips has been improved by about 10 times by utilizing these two machines," Jia told CMG.
Since its operation in January 2022, the production line has introduced 24 sets of quantum chip production equipment, incubated three sets of special equipment for quantum chips, and delivered multiple batches of quantum chips and quantum amplifiers, said Jia.