Technology

Qilimanjaro’s state-of-the art services and solutions address the strategic needs for timely and affordable quantum readiness

From full-stack to co-design

In Qilimanjaro we believe the co-design of our quantum solutions is key to deliver real-world applications of quantum computing as soon as possible.

This is the reason behind our unique full-stack nature, which brings together the expertise of experienced researchers and engineers from the different quantum application, software and hardware areas. With this, the development pipeline of our quantum devices is constantly evolving and iterating back-and-forth between the algorithm and hardware designs to adjust as much as possible one to another.

Analog quantum devices: our true innovation

We focus on superconducting qubits, as the preferred hardware architecture. While we also deliver gate-based systems, our innovation roadmap relies on the development of a new generation of analog quantum devices.

Rather than slicing problems into a set of discrete operations, as in gate-based processors, which may introduce several control errors, analog quantum computers encode the problem in the quantum description (e.g. Hamiltonian) of the device and let the system evolve with time under continuous control. Importantly, they are a promising alternative to bypass the need for heavy error correction protocols and their associated qubit overheads.

Gate-based quantum computer

Analog quantum computer

Coherent quantum annealers to provide advantage now

It is part of our long-term vision to develop a universal analog quantum computer competitive with the future fault-tolerant gate-based systems. In the short-term, we focus on delivering app-specific analog quantum devices to start providing advantage to our customers now.

Quantum annealers are a type of analog device that can map very well certain optimization tasks of great importance (notable examples include classical problems such as scheduling, traffic flow optimization, machine learning, and quantum problems such as quantum chemistry). However, current quantum annealers present a series of technical limitations that prevent them from outperforming classical computers.

In Qilimanjaro we leverage these challenges and make them the basic ingredients of our differentiated architecture proposal:

High qubit quality

We put qubit quality as our top performance metric to ensure that quantum effects are present over the entire computation in order to yield true quantum advantage

Quantum interactions

We engineer a wide set of qubit-qubit interactions to allow for the encoding of a wider variety of problems, including pure quantum problems in the domain of physics and chemistry simulation.

Number of qubits

We develop novel encoding techniques for more efficient mappings of the problem variables to the quantum device thus reducing the need of huge qubit counts of current proposals.

Dense connectivity

We design packed architectures that translate into a high density of connections to be able to encode complex graphs for optimization problems with low qubit overheads.

Democratizing quantum

Qilimanjaro brings quantum computation closer to the user. We are developing a cloud infrastructure that allows companies and academic institutions to run and test their algorithms in our devices. To ease the interaction between the user and the device we have contributed to the development of a full-stack programming framework named Qibo.

We allow the user, through an agnostic to hardware and high-level representation, to run computations both in our analog quantum devices as well as in our high-performance classical emulators. Qibo is in turn integrated with a complete software stack containing the corresponding compilation and optimization layers for an efficient translation of the user problem into a low-level set of control instructions that are directly applied to Qilimanjaro’s quantum devices.