Amazon on Thursday, February 27, unveiled a prototype of its first-ever in-house quantum computing chip called Ocelot. The tech giant said that the Ocelot chip has been designed to help Amazon build highly efficient hardware systems.Ocelot is a nine-qubit chip that has been internally fabricated by Amazon. The company claimed that Ocelot can reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90 per cent, when compared to current approaches.Amazon’s announcement comes a week after rival Microsoft introduced its own quantum computing chip ‘Majorana 1’ that has been designed to be potentially scaled to a million qubits.Qubits are the building blocks of quantum computers. While classical computers are used to process binary code comprising bits, qubits are based on the principles of quantum mechanics and display the property of superposition, that is, they simultaneously exist in both the ground state (with a value of 0) and excited state (with a value of 1).“We believe that scaling Ocelot to a full-fledged quantum computer capable of transformative societal impact would require as little as one-tenth as many resources as common approaches, helping bring closer the age of practical quantum computing,” Amazon said in a blog post.Also Read | Is Microsoft’s quantum computing breakthrough the real deal? Experts weigh inAmazon said that the underlying architecture of Ocelot has been designed to be error-resistant from the ground up. Error generation is a major challenge when it comes to scaling qubits, which are known to collapse into normal behaviour due to the slightest of external disturbances in temperature or pressure. Hence, maintaining the stability of qubits is a huge issue.Amazon claimed that its researchers have combined quantum error correction components with ‘cat qubits’ onto a scalable microchip. Named after the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, cat qubits intrinsically suppress certain forms of errors, reducing the resources required for quantum error correction, according to Amazon.Story continues below this ad“In the future, quantum chips built according to the Ocelot architecture could cost as little as one-fifth of current approaches, due to the drastically reduced number of resources required for error correction. Concretely, we believe this will accelerate our timeline to a practical quantum computer by up to five years,” said Oskar Painter, AWS director of Quantum Hardware.In 2020, Amazon unveiled its Braket platform that lets developers experiment with quantum computers developed by other companies such as IonQ and Rigetti Computing. Now, the company could also make its in-house quantum chip available through Braket.© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd