The chip uses some of the same technology as current networking chips and would help link together smaller quantum computers into larger systems. But Cisco also believes it will have practical applications before those computers become mainstream, such as helping financial firms sync up the timing of trades or helping scientists detect meteorites.
There are a whole bunch of use cases, said Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Ciscos Outshift innovation incubator. You need to synchronise clocks and the timestamps on all of these snapshots that are taking place from across the globe.
Cisco is the latest mainstream tech firm to jump into quantum computing.
Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all announced quantum computing chips in recent months, and Nvidia plans to open its own quantum computing lab. Start-ups such as PsiQuantum are also raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build systems.