Cisco Announces Quantum Networking Chip and a Quantum Computing Lab in California
According to Reuters reports, Cisco (Cisco Systems) in the local time on May 6 to show a prototype network chip for connecting quantum computers, at the same time announced in the United States in Santa Monica, California (Santa Monica) to set up a new quantum computing laboratory, in order to promote the development of quantum technology.
Specifically, the quantum network chip operates at standard telecom wavelengths, so it can take advantage of existing fiber optic infrastructures; operates as a miniature photonic integrated chip (PIC) at room temperature, making it suitable for today's scalable system deployments; consumes less than 1mW of power; and has 1 million high-fidelity entangled pairs per output channel, with an on-chip rate of up to 200 million entangled pairs per second.
Cisco believes that the technology already has practical applications before quantum computers become commonplace, such as assisting financial firms in synchronizing trading times or helping scientists detect meteorites.
Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Outshift, Cisco's innovation incubation division, revealed, “There are a lot of application scenarios. You need to synchronize clocks so that snapshots of global data can match timestamps.”
Google, Microsoft and Amazon have recently announced their own quantum computing chip program, NVIDIA (NVIDIA) also intends to set up a quantum computing laboratory. In addition, start-ups including PsiQuantum are raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build quantum computing systems.
Unlike the companies mentioned above, which are focused on developing more “quantum bits” (qubit), Cisco's strategy is to enable quantum computers to be connected to each other.
Cisco pointed out that the chip was developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), which works by allowing a pair of photons to produce “quantum entanglement”, and then one of the photons were sent to two independent quantum computers. In a short period of time, these quantum computers can communicate instantly through this pair of entangled photons, also known as “spooky action at a distance” (spooky action at a distance) by Albert Einstein, a quantum physics phenomenon.
Pandey emphasized that the chip is still in the prototype stage, there is no specific timetable for the market, “to construct a quantum network, the first basic building block is a quantum entanglement chip, and we are now showing this first basic building block.