Your Tool to Master the Long-Lived Logical Qubit the New ZQCS Quantum Control System

Today, Zurich Instruments announced the ZQCS Quantum Control System, a next-generation platform to operate large-scale quantum computers. It is engineered to tackle the pivotal challenge on the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing: building long-lived logical qubits.

Physical qubits are fragile; noise and drift can erase quantum information in microseconds. The remedy is to use logical qubits, which encode quantum information across many physical qubits, thereby enabling error correction. This approach elevates the control system from a mere pulse generator to the stabilizing core of the quantum computer: it must coordinate hundreds to thousands of channels while producing ultra-stable pulses, and close real-time feedback loops at microsecond timescales. These requirements are at the core of the field’s main challenges – scaling to several thousand qubits, pushing gate fidelities to five nines and beyond, and mastering quantum error correction. The ZQCS is the control system built to meet these needs, uniting scalable direct-RF electronics, deterministic real-time networking, and powerful software.

“We designed the ZQCS end-to-end for the logical-qubit era – starting from the analog front end, through the real-time fabric, to software – so researchers and system builders can address scale, fidelity, and error correction together,” says Andrea Orzati, CEO at Zurich Instruments.