Hardware experiments and simulations now demonstrate encoded quantum memories, gates, and small computations. But the codes, circuits, decoders, and control logic are often tailored to each demonstration, making these advances difficult to reuse and combine into new and larger computations.

We need an architecture that turns these components into a programmable computer with fault tolerance built in. A quantum codec (qodec) offers an organizing abstraction by formalizing a quantum error-correction protocol, including encoding, logical operations, and decoding. This turns research paper descriptions into specifications that software can analyze and use to drive hardware execution.

I will describe our work at Microsoft to build and test qodecs with the Quantum Development Kit (QDK), decode dynamic logical circuits with deq, and integrate these tools and concepts into the architecture of Magne, the neutral-atom quantum computer we are developing with Atom Computing for commercial operation by QuNorth.