Metal

Early access for quantum device design project now open

Our vision is to develop a community-driven universal toolkit capable of orchestrating quantum chip development from concept to fabrication in a simple, scalable, and open framework.

A first-of-its-kind, open-source project for engineers and scientists to design superconducting quantum devices with ease: Qiskit Metal.

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Our vision

Design quantum systems

Qiskit Metal enables chip prototyping in a matter of minutes. You can start from a convenient Python Jupyter notebook or take advantage of the user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI). Simply choose from a library of predefined quantum components, such as transmon qubits and coplanar resonators, and customize their parameters in real-time to fit your needs. Use the built-in algorithms to automatically connect components. Easily implement new experimental components using Python templates and examples.

Modeling quantum systems

Metal helps automate the quantum electrodynamics modeling of quantum devices to predict their performance and parameters, such as qubit frequencies, anharmonicities, couplings, and dissipation. Metal’s vision is to provide the abstraction layer needed to seamlessly interconnect with your favorite electromagnetic analysis tool (HFSS, Sonnet, CST, AWR, Comsol, …), dynamically rendering and co-simulating your design, at the whim of a click.

Analysis design performance

Metal aims to give access to advanced quantum analysis techniques to calculate qubit frequencies, anharmonicities, and extract non-linear couplings, dissipation, and the full Hamiltonian of the quantum device, with percent-level accuracy.

We plan to include the Energy Participation Ratio (EPR), impedance analysis, and the lumped-oscillator model. We hope to further build up the quantum analysis library in collaboration with the community.

Why Qiskit Metal

Designing quantum devices is the bedrock of the quantum ecosystem, but it is a difficult, multi-step process that connects traditionally disparate worlds.

Metal is automating and streamlining this process. Our vision is to develop a community-driven universal platform capable of orchestrating quantum chip development from concept to fabrication in a simple and open framework.

End-to-end automation

Metal is designed with the vision to seamlessly automate classical and quantum analysis. Choose from a list of available tools or connect your own through a flexible plug-in interface that allows you to orchestrate device design from within Metal. When you are ready, with the click of a button, export the design for fabrication, and you are done.

Flexible & extensible

Flexible interface: GUI view, Jupyter notebook view, Simulator view, Physical output view.

Extensible: User-friendly Python API and library of tools allow you to define your own custom quantum components.

Co-development: Linked with leading simulation and export/import interoperability with commercial-tool backends.

Light-weight interoperability

All-in-one platform powerful programming paradigm to unify design, simulation, and quantum analysis.

Metal helps bridge the world of classical electronic design automation (EDA) and electromagnetic simulation tools with that of quantum analysis.

Metal defines the abstraction of a quantum device design, needed for closed-loop optimization between design and analysis. Over time, our vision is to also develop Metal to be usable by a front-end user with little to no programming knowledge, using available libraries of quantum components and renderers.

Experimentally tested

Metal utilizes quantization methods and techniques from both the community and our own development. In an upcoming publication, Minev, McConkey & Gambetta will share some early results that demonstrate percent-level agreement between design and analysis and experimental hardware.

Library of components

Benefit from built-in and community-developed library of quantum device components. This library is in its early stages, and we are looking for members of the community to work with to develop this together.

Cutting edge resources

Tap into built-in best practices and the latest simulation and analysis techniques. Help us test and build a shared set of cutting edge resources to help power the innovation of quantum hardware.

Building together

Whether you are learning, teaching, or performing scientific research, we hope Metal will get you there faster.

Call for community participation

This may just be the beginning, but we think Qiskit Metal has immense potential. We hope to form this software into something that is usable by superconducting quantum hardware designers across industry and academia, and perhaps even for other qubit architectures. Over time, we hope this project will become the gateway for conventional microchip designers to get their feet wet designing quantum processors. And we hope that soon, quantum hardware experts will be able to write their own quantum analysis plugins and run them as their own Qiskit Metal backends.

Open source

Qiskit Metal is a visionary work in progress in its early development stages. We're working toward a vision—a quantum design and analysis platform built from the ground up specifically for quantum hardware. It is crucial that we keep this project open source in order to grow Qiskit Metal into the software that will be most useful for quantum hardware engineers around the world and for the innovation in and growth of the field as a whole. If Qiskit Metal doesn't have what you want, then you extend Metal to build it!

Education

Learn more about the physics behind Qiskit Metal and qubit design from the Introduction to Quantum Computing and Quantum Hardware summer school lectures series by Zlatko Minev on superconducting qubits. Also, check out the open source Qiskit textbook chapters on quantum devices and their control.

Sketched illustration of a group standing in front of a whiteboard.

Early Access

Through an early-access program, we are thrilled to ask you to join this journey to revolutionize quantum devices.

The early-access program will start in November and proceed through March, 2021, during which time we will work closely to develop Metal and design quantum devices with it.