Cisco says its new entanglement chip could speed up practical quantum computing timeline by a decade

Cisco is the latest company to announce a quantum breakthrough.

On Tuesday, the company said it has developed a prototype entanglement source chip that has the potential to cut the timeline for practical quantum computing by as much as a decade. The chip was developed in partnership with UC Santa Barbara and is novel in that it generates up to one million entangled photon pairs per second, and does so at room temperature, saving considerable resources.

Additionally, Cisco is also announcing the opening of Cisco Quantum Labs, which will be the company’s dedicated quantum research hub in Santa Monica, California. The chip itself was developed at Cisco’s “Outshift” incubator, where Viljoy Pandey, senior vice president at Outshift by Cisco, says the company works on projects that are “slightly out of the comfort zone.” 

“We’re a networking company,” says Pandey. “We’re looking at quantum networking and quantum security.”

“Our thesis is pretty straightforward: To make [quantum computing] practical, you need to scale it out,” he adds. “You need a network, and to have a quantum network, you need a quantum entanglement chip. That’s the first building block.”

In practice, the chip will allow quantum computers to be networked together—similar to existing networks for classical computers—enabling distributed quantum computing.

‘There’s going to be a ChatGPT moment for quantum’

While other companies are focused on building quantum computers themselves, Cisco is working on the infrastructure to make quantum computing actually work—and it’s attempting to get ahead of things by developing the network and security frameworks while large-scale quantum demand is still likely years away.

Moreover, while some experts have mused that quantum computing could be as far as 20 years down the road, Pandey says that Cisco’s breakthrough likely cuts that timeline by “between five and 10 years.”

Building the chip took between three and four years, and now Cisco is looking at moving it into production, says Reza Nejabati, head of Quantum Research and Quantum Labs at Outshift by Cisco.

“We’re working toward more commercial fabrication,” he says. “There’s a whole bunch of hardware and software technology that we’re bringing up. The quantum proof of concept is happening.”

As for what’s next, Pandey says Cisco will work on software to help build out a quantum network and continue work on a quantum roadmap. “There’s going to be a ChatGPT moment for quantum,” he says. “We need to start putting the fundamental building blocks together to prepare.”