Tracking key milestones in the race to fault-tolerant quantum computing. Error correction is the single most important technical challenge standing between today's noisy quantum processors and practically useful quantum computers.
| Date | Company | Milestone | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-12 | Willow chip demonstrates below-threshold surface code error correction with 105 qubits | high | |
| 2024-11 | Quantinuum | Demonstrates 12 logical qubits with real-time error correction on H2 processor | high |
| 2024-09 | Microsoft + Quantinuum | Creates 4 reliable logical qubits with 800x error improvement using active syndrome extraction | high |
| 2024-06 | IBM | Demonstrates 12-qubit color code with magic state distillation on 127-qubit Eagle processor | medium |
| 2024-03 | QuEra | Demonstrates 48 logical qubits and entangling operations between them on neutral-atom platform | high |
| 2023-12 | Atom Computing | Demonstrates 1,225-qubit neutral-atom array with >99.5% single-qubit fidelity | medium |
| 2023-10 | IBM | Error mitigation enables 127-qubit utility-scale computation beyond classical brute-force simulation | medium |
| 2023-02 | Sycamore demonstrates distance-3 and distance-5 surface codes, showing error rate decreases with code distance | high | |
| 2022-11 | Quantinuum | Demonstrates fault-tolerant Steane code on H1 trapped-ion processor with real-time decoding | medium |
| 2021-10 | Google + UMD | First logical qubit operations with below-threshold error rates in small surface codes | medium |