Oxford Quantum Circuits

Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) is a leader in quantum computing in the United Kingdom and Europe. With its latest system, Lucy, OQC creates the potential for strategic partners and customers to make breakthrough discoveries, solving some of the world’s most challenging problems.

“Bringing OQC’s quantum computers to Amazon Braket was a natural next step in expanding our leadership in Europe. Our relationship with AWS makes it easier and more convenient for businesses and researchers in Europe to further experiment with quantum. From low latency to Europe-friendly uptime, from data on-shoring to hybrid workloads, OQC on Braket is a significant step forward in bringing quantum to our customer’s fingertips.”

Dr. Ilana Wisby, CEO - OQC

Before they are executed, quantum programs are processed through the compiler toolchain. They can then be optimized to a level determined by the user, assembled into native instructions, and sequenced for execution by OQC’s in-house designed and built control hardware. OQC’s compiler is designed to optimize the number of gates required to execute the circuit. As the number of gates directly affects the quality of the results due to the inherent noise in the device, the fewer gates to pass through, the better the result. Sequences of optimized microwave pulses are then used to drive the most appropriate chains of qubits on the QPU. OQC also supports verbatim compilation, which provides customers the option to directly run circuits using the native gate set and topology supported on the device, without any intervening optimizing compiler passes.

With next generation quantum hardware being developed, the need for matching quantum instructions and interoperability between hardware backends is critical. At launch, OQC supports OpenQASM 2.0 as the intermediate, device-agnostic representation for expressing quantum programs into instructions that can be run on different gate-based quantum computers. OQC and AWS are committed to supporting the OpenQASM roadmap, with AWS participating in the OpenQASM steering committee.

Hybrid quantum-classical workloads are a promising path for customers to benefit from quantum computers in the near term. With the recent launch of hybrid jobs on Amazon Braket, customers will be able to run hybrid quantum-classical algorithms with Lucy as the quantum backend, taking advantage of features such as on-demand priority access to the Lucy device for the duration of their experiments, and fully managed access to classical compute resources.