Fujitsu and The University of Osaka develop new technologies for chemical material energy calculations on early-FTQC quantum computers

Quantum computing holds significant promise across a wide range of industries, including drug discovery, cryptography, and finance. However, current quantum systems are highly error-prone, and practical applications are generally believed to require quantum computers with millions of qubits.

To improve error correction and accelerate practical application of quantum computing, Fujitsu and The University of Osaka established the STAR architecture ver. 1 on March 23, 2023, followed by ver. 2 on August 28, 2024. The latter, with advanced phase rotation gates, significantly expanded computational scale, enabling potential early-FTQC calculations of solid-state material properties like high-temperature superconductivity.

However, accurately calculating complex molecular chemical energies for practical applications still required excessive resources, and prior methods were limited by insufficient computational power or impractical timeframes.

This joint research [1] has demonstrated that combining the following two technologies enables energy calculations for chemical materials with sufficient accuracy and within a practical timeframe:

To validate the effectiveness of these technologies, the researchers evaluated the number of qubits and computational time required for industrially applicable energy calculations for three distinct molecules: Cytochrome P450, an important oxidizing enzyme in drug discovery; Iron-sulfur clusters, catalytic proteins involved in ammonia synthesis and energy metabolism; and Ruthenium catalysts, a focus in synthetic chemistry. Accurate energy calculations for these molecules are currently infeasible with classical computers due to memory limitations. Even with the STAR architecture ver. 2, such computations would take several millennia and high precision calculations would be difficult to achieve due to the scale of the calculation. The results of this validation primarily demonstrate that the STAR architecture ver. 3 reduces the number of qubits necessary to perform the calculations to between 1/15 and 1/80 of conventional FTQC architectures. Furthermore, the partners confirmed that calculations are feasible on early-FTQC quantum computers even with a lowered physical error rate requirement for qubits, from the previous 0.01% to 0.10%.

Held on March 25, 2026