Microsoft has unveiled a new quantum processing unit, the first to be built on a topological core.

Majorana 1 is named after previously-hypothesized Majorana particle, which Microsoft now believes it has proved. The new class of materials, known as topoconductors, allows the system to create topological superconductivity.

Topoconductors are an entirely new state of matter, Microsoft claims - not a solid, liquid or gas but a topological state.

The Majorana 1 chip, which is cooled close to absolute zero and tuned with magnetic fields, has topological superconducting nanowires with Majorana Zero Modes (MZMs) at the wire’s ends.

Those MZMs are used as qubits, the key to a quantum computing system.

"The qubits created with topoconductors are faster, more reliable, and smaller," CEO Satya Nadella said, referencing other quantum approaches.

"They are 1/100th of a millimeter, meaning we now have a clear path to a million-qubit processor."

The company has only managed to scale to eight qubits so far, however.

“Whatever you’re doing in the quantum space needs to have a path to a million qubits. If it doesn’t, you’re going to hit a wall before you get to the scale at which you can solve the really important problems that motivate us,” Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow, said. “We have actually worked out a path to a million.”

Microsoft is one of two companies to move to the final phase of DARPA’s Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program, alongside PsiQuantum.

As part of the program, Microsoft plans to build an error-corrected, utility-scale quantum computer. The company said that its approach can be deployed in standard Azure data centers.

"We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years," CEO Nadella said.