On 13 February D-Wave Systems Inc. demonstrated the first commercially viable quantum computer at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Quantum computing offers a different approach to solving tasks that are excessively time-consuming on classical computers (CERN Courier April 2006 p22). At the demonstration, the company showed a pattern-matching application to search databases of molecules as well as an application for finding the optimal seating arrangements at a wedding or party, subject to constraints.
D-Wave developed the Orion quantum chip in part by using processes and infrastructure associated with the semiconductor industry. It also included other components, such as a new type of analogue processor that uses quantum mechanics rather than conventional physics to drive the computation. This approach in principle should allow the building of scalable processor architectures using available processes and technologies. In addition, the quantum chip's processors are computationally equivalent to more standard devices.
The chip operates at a base temperature of 5 mK and contains 16 quantum bits, or qubits, arranged in a 4 × 4 array. Each one is coupled to its nearest neighbours, including diagonally, giving a total of 42 couplings.
While quantum computing offers the potential to create value in areas where problems or requirements exceed the capability of digital computing, the demonstration by D-Wave was met with some scepticism by the scientific community, as the number of connections in the chip is very limited and further details from the company were scarce. Nevertheless, if further developments show a clear speed increase compared with conventional digital computers, this could be an important step towards quantum computing.