QEC, in combination with the theory of fault-tolerant quantum computing, suggests that engineers can in principle build an arbitrarily large quantum computer that if operated correctly would be capable of arbitrarily long computations. Unfortunately, with corporate roadmaps and complex scientific literature highlighting an increasing number of relevant experiments, an emerging narrative is falsely painting QEC as a future panacea for the life-threatening ills of quantum computing. 2021 may just be the year when it is convincingly demonstrated to give a net benefit in real quantum-computing hardware. QEC is real and has seen many partial demonstrations in laboratories around the world-initial steps that make it clear it's a viable approach. It's able to draw from validated mathematical approaches used to engineer special “radiation hardened" classical microprocessors deployed in space or other extreme environments where errors are much more likely to occur. Quantum error correction-or QEC for short-is an algorithm designed to identify and fix errors in quantum computers. Compare that with the approximately one billion years of continuous operation before a transistor in a conventional computer fails, and it becomes obvious that we have a long way to go.Ĭompanies building quantum computers like IBM and Google have highlighted that their roadmaps include the use of “ quantum error correction" to achieve what is known as fault-tolerant quantum computing as they scale to machines with 1,000 or more qubits. Today's machines tend to suffer hardware failures-errors in the underlying quantum information carriers called qubits-in times much shorter than a second. But as most users know, they remain research experiments, limited by imperfections in hardware.
Quantum computers are gaining traction across fields from logistics to finance.
The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE.
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