This blog aims to be a practical and light guide to building your own quantum computer.
I do not mean to say that building a quantum computer is a light thing, but rather that, if there could be a “light” way to explain to “non specialists” how a quantum computer is built, this could be very useful. I like to make the parallel with the way standard desktop computers are built: A CPU, memory, disk, a GPU, all of this on a motherboard. But what about a quantum computer? Can it be built in a similar way?
If we can build a quantum computer (and I hope this will happen within the next five years), the next big question is: how do you use it and obtain useful results from it? Can you use a regular programming language, such as C, that we use on ordinary (classical) computers? Or do you need to think in a new way, or a mental model, to work with quantum results and observations?
These are the two main questions I want to address in this blog: what you need to build a quantum computer and how to utilize it. I will assume you do not have any background in quantum physics, but you are familiar with how regular computers are built and eventually programmed (or just “vibed-coded” nowadays).
A bit about me: I work for Qblox, a scale-up company in Delft, building a quantum control stack. I am responsible for the system architecture, encompassing both hardware and software, and I focus on optimizing the software to run as efficiently as possible. It is a fascinating job, and that is why I want to share what I am learning in this blog, of course, without sharing any secrets.
As a Kickstarter, I want to introduce a comic strip that Quantum Machines (a competitor of the company I work for) has recently posted:
(image credits: QM)
This strip gives an interresting analogy about the challenge behind “driving” a quantum computer, which is described as “driving hundreds of users (quantum controllers) swinging thousands of qubits (quantum elements), in parallel, and in a perfectely pipelined, synchronous, all this with nano second accuracy”. What is even more interesting is that those numbers will be multiplied by a thousand within five years (2030), so the challenge is going to become increasingly exciting.