Oxford Quantum Circuits

OQC

Overview

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

OQC’s Superconducting Quantum Processors

OQC’s system, Lucy, is an 8-qubit quantum computer. It is named after Lucy Mensing, a German physicist and a pioneer of quantum mechanics. OQC’s core technology innovation – the Coaxmon – is a qubit developed from first principles with commercial scalability in mind.

A key challenge of superconducting circuits for quantum computation is the ability to scale qubit numbers while maintaining qubit quality and control in order to reach a commercially useful level of processing power. ‘Traditional’ two-dimensional devices require increasingly intricate engineering to route control wiring across the chip to each qubit. This both degrades the quality of the qubits and increases the chance of costly engineering errors.

The Coaxmon addresses these challenges: it has a three-dimensional architecture that brings key componentry off-chip for increased simplicity, flexibility, ease of engineering, and – crucially – scalability. This means that all of OQC’s QPUs are designed for long coherence times, low cross-talk, and high-fidelity superfast gate operation times. The Coaxmon's unique design helps scale to larger two-dimensional qubit arrays by being less susceptible to the limitations of qubit layout or qubit-to-qubit connectivity.

OQC's innovative technology

OQC’s Superconducting Quantum Processors

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.

Use cases

OQC’s QPU Performance

Please visit OQC's webpage for system and performance information, including gate fidelities and coherence times.

New horizons for quantum users in Europe

OQC is the first quantum hardware company in Europe to provide its technology on Amazon Braket. This provides users in this region particularly, but also around the world, multiple benefits:

  • Europe-friendly up-time hours: with OQC’s Lucy located in the UK, European and Middle-East users may take advantage of friendly uptime and serviceability during working hours. This will also enable OQC to provide real-time consulting services to leading European companies as they innovate in quantum technologies.
  • Low Latency: with closer-to-home quantum capability, European users will see a decreased data transfer time, making for smoother experiments and lower task and job latencies.
  • Data on-shoring and privacy: Government agencies and large corporations with strict data residency requirements now have access to a Europe-based quantum device through OQC and Amazon Braket.