Building quantum computers that don't need better qubits, they need better plumbing

[Leo70]

In an interview with AZoQuantum, Dr Sebastian Krinner, product manager for Zurich Instruments' new ZQCS Quantum Control System, explains why the entire quantum computing industry has pivoted away from chasing noisy intermediate scale devices and toward fault tolerance and logical qubits instead, arguing there's simply no convincing evidence NISQ era systems will ever deliver meaningful advantage on commercially relevant problems

Control electronics sit at the center of every quantum computer, and Krinner argues three capabilities have to work together to get long lived logical qubits, scaling from tens to thousands of physical qubits, maintaining extremely high gate fidelity, and running quantum error correction continuously in real time. The ZQCS was purpose built around all three, using dedicated timing ASICs to distribute a single global clock across every module so the whole system stays synchronized as it scales, and a modular accelerator architecture that keeps pulse execution deterministic while still leaving room for researchers to experiment with different error correction decoders

Krinner, who previously worked at ETH Zurich on one of the world's first logical qubits built from superconducting surface codes, says the community's central question has genuinely shifted, researchers used to ask how to build a better individual qubit, now they're asking how to operate thousands of logical qubits reliably at scale, a shift from scientific discovery toward systems engineering. That shift shows up in mundane but critical details too, the ZQCS uses water cooled racks and the same advanced telecommunications computing architecture used at CERN specifically to make cable routing, servicing and long term maintenance manageable as labs scale up

The platform also supports a low latency communication protocol connecting directly to external CPUs, GPUs and HPC clusters, letting researchers experiment with machine learning based error decoders rather than being locked into whatever decoding approach ships with the hardware, since Krinner is candid that nobody yet knows which error correction strategy will ultimately prove optimal

Quantum Control Systems for Long-Lived Logical Qubitswww.azoquantum.com