This week, Shenzhen, China-based company SpinQ claimed the shipment of the first China-made Quantum Processing Unit (QPU), Shaowei, based on superconducting qubit technology. The claim that SpinQ is now the first Chinese quantum-focused company to sell its technologies beyond mainland China - whilst leveraging a superconducting qubit design setup at that - seems to point to a newfound source of quantum processing chips for any global players that wouldn't be easily provided for by the western market. According to SpinQ, the recipient of its Shaowei chips (and the first international customer of the company's product) is located somewhere in the Middle East.
Qubits are the quantum computing equivalent of a classical bit; while bits are deterministic and can only ever represent either a 0 or a 1, qubits are probabilistic, and consider the entire solution space between both. Recent advantages have brought quantum computing up to a point where the best products actually have enough quantum volume (a measure of a quantum computer's overall performance) to provide useful calculations that are beyond what could be possible with classical computers or even supercomputers.
Established in 2018, SpinQ recently drew our attention to its quantum processing offerings by providing "quantop" solutions: these are relatively simple, one-to-three-qubits, desktop-based quantum processing systems meant for the research and education markets. Far and away from providing any significant quantum computing capability, the "quantops" delivered by SpinQ used nuclear magnetic resonance qubits. But the new Shaowei QPU, being based on superconducting qubit technology that's theoretically similar to IBM's approach, means that the company is branching out its understanding and capability to deliver useful quantum computers. SpinQ says Shaowei utilizes a stable, all-solid-state system that's especially geared towards taking advantage of and reusing more classical chip manufacturing technology.
Considering how China keeps skirting the impact of the US technological sanctions and has achieved an internal 5 nm chip manufacturing milestone without the aid of US tech, this looks like a winning bet.
According to SpinQ, its new superconducting-qubit Shaowei chips were built completely in-house through the company's factories in the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Cooperation Zone. Its approach is much like IBM's (and like that of most quantum tech suppliers) in that the company aims to provide a "full-stack" approach to quantum computing by delivering every required element of the ecosystem: quantum processing units, low-temperature electronics, temperature and qubit measurement and control systems, as well as software and algorithm development applications.
Unfortunately, there's little information available on what exactly makes a Shaowei chip, well, tick. Qubit number and connection density are useful metrics, but SpinQ provides none. However, the company claims the coherence time for the qubits inside Shaowei is in the order of 10-100 microseconds (where a higher window of qubit coherence means the qubits are processing information without any catastrophic data loss). But in quantum computing (and every computational effort), results have to be trusted: SpinQ mentioned that Shaowei can perform both single and double-bit gate operations (in the nanosecond scale) and can achieve more than 99.9% single-bit gate fidelity and more than 98% double-bit gate fidelity. While that may sound like a lot, it really isn't: when your CPU can process millions of calculations per second, that 0.01% error rate can add up quickly, and impact the validity (and truthfulness) of the computed results.
It remains to be seen where SpinQ will take its superconducting qubits next, but it's perhaps surprising that China is already selling Quantum Processing Units overseas before 2023 comes to a close.
