Microsoft Announces New Capabilities To Tackle A Major Issue In Quantum Computing

Advancements in error correction can lead to more reliable quantum computation.

Microsoft’s quantum team announced Thursday that it has made advancements in its quantum compute platform that addresses a large issue in quantum computing: error correction.

The team said it has developed a family of “novel four-dimensional" error correction codes that are “applicable to many types of qubits,” the team said in a blog post.

A qubit, or quantum bit, is “the basic unit of information used to encode data in quantum computing and can be best understood as the quantum equivalent of the traditional bit used by classical computers to encode information in binary,” as defined by IBM.

Because the novel codes require very few physical qubits per logical qubit, they can “check for errors in a single shot and exhibit a 1,000-fold reduction in error rates,” the Microsoft team said.

Error correction is fundamental to quantum computing as it reduces errors that interfere with quantum computation, Paul Terry, CEO of quantum company Photonic, said in a statement to MES Computing in December 2024.

“Significant improvement across the industry is needed in the number of error-correcting qubits and the efficiency of error correction before quantum computers become more broadly useful in business environments,” Terry said at the time.

Microsoft also addressed the issue in its blog post. “Most of today’s quantum computers operate with qubits that are prone to errors and thus are not capable of reliable computation on their own,” the quantum team said.

The team explained how the new 4D codes reduce the error rates of physical qubits by “orders of magnitude.” The codes reduce the number of steps needed to diagnose errors, something Microsoft says can make for “low-depth operations and computations.” Additionally, the codes reduce the number of physical qubits needed to achieve “fault-tolerant quantum computing.”

Microsoft touted an earlier breakthrough in error correction last year through its collaboration with Quantinuum.

Using Quantinuum's ion-trap hardware with Microsoft's qubit-virtualization system, the company's error correction algorithm yielded around four reliable qubits from 30 physical ones. These logical qubits exhibited an error rate 800 times better than their physical counterparts, signifying a substantial leap in quantum computing reliability, MES Computing’s sister site Computing reported.

And in December 2024, Google announced it had made its own breakthrough in quantum computing with its Willow chip.

Willow “performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years—a number that vastly exceeds the age of the universe,” said Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven, at the time of the announcement.

Willow’s error-correction capabilities address “one of the greatest challenges in quantum computing, since qubits, the units of computation in quantum computers, have a tendency to rapidly exchange information with their environment, making it difficult to protect the information needed to complete a computation. Typically, the more qubits you use, the more errors will occur, and the system becomes classical,” Neven said.

While these breakthrough announcements generate excitement over quantum computing, they are not an indication that quantum computers are ready for most businesses just yet, Terry said.

“Quantum technologies still need to mature before quantum computing becomes truly mainstream. To become commercially relevant, quantum computers need thousands of reliable [also known as logical] qubits that can sustain error-free operations for billions of program steps,” he said.

Microsoft’s new family of codes is available in the Microsoft Quantum compute platform.