There five leading quantum computing approaches being explored worldwide: silicon spin qubits, ion traps, superconducting loops, diamond vacancies and topological qubits. University of New South Wales has new scalable CMOS chip design based on silicon spin qubits. They believe the design will scale to millions of qubits for universal computation and with error correction.

The main problem with all current approaches is that there is no clear pathway to scaling the number of quantum bits up to the millions needed without the computer becoming huge a system requiring bulky supporting equipment and costly infrastructure.

UNSW relies on its silicon spin qubit approach – which already mimics much of the solid-state devices in silicon that are the heart of the US$380 billion global semiconductor industry and it will work with spin qubit error correcting code into existing chip designs, enabling true universal quantum computation.