Walking Cat Architecture

The Walking Cat Architecture is IonQ's end-to-end blueprint for fault-tolerant trapped-ion computing, built on quantum LDPC codes and the ability to move ions across a chip. Cat states are produced in dedicated factories and walked to where they're needed, so logical operations are fed by a continuous supply of error-correction resources.

The demonstration here shows a Superion 10K-qubit system built from multiple 256-qubit unit cells, and how work flows across them. Hover over and click on a cell to see how the architecture works in action.
Superion 10K QPU
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Walking Cat Architecture
SEC 0 · Measurements 0 · T Gates 0 · Qubit Loss 0

Walking Cat

Demonstrated path to megaquop FTQC

Complete blueprintarXiv 2604.19481 Electronic qubit controlarXiv 2407.07694 Breakeven qLDPCarXiv 2606.06455 Real-time decodingarXiv 2608.25027 >99.99% two-qubit gate fidelityarXiv 2510.17286
Contact us to learn more about the Superion 256 and 10K systems

Legend

  • Data: physical qubits that make up the logical qubits, remaining fixed in place.
  • Ancilla: helper qubits used to diagnose errors during a syndrome extraction cycle (SEC).
  • Beacon: qubits that flag when a neighboring qubit is lost to leakage or noise.
  • Magic: qubits that make up magic states, used to perform logical T-gates.
  • Cat: cat states that move throughout the chip to conduct logical measurements.
  • Bell: qubits that make up Bell pairs, used to stitch together two cat states.
  • Reservoir: fresh ions used to replace lost qubits.