IonQ Aria: Past and Future (Part Two)
This is part two of a series going deep on IonQ Aria, launched in 2022 as the world’s most powerful quantum computer. Part one is available here.
IonQ Aria features 21 fully-connected, high-quality qubits. All-to-all connectivity, as represented above, enables the system to entangle any qubit with any other qubit with no additional overhead.
IonQ grew out of 15 years of collaborative research by Chris Monroe, a professor at the University of Maryland and now at Duke University, and Jungsang Kim, of Duke University. In 2013 they published “Scaling the Ion Trap Processor” in Science. It described their ideas for how ion trap technology could be scaled up and improved in order to create quantum computers capable of solving problems beyond the reach of any classical computer.
Crucially, they understood the need for a modular architecture, including the use of the "Quantum Charge-Coupled Device" or QCCD to shuttle ions around a single chip, and the use of modular photonic interconnects between chips. Both ideas were invented and developed by the IonQ founders. They also understood how important all-to-all connectivity would become in quantum computing applications and decided to design a system architecture that would include that feature at scale, and designed with this capability as a focus.
