Researchers from Bristol University in Great Britain, who have been developing quantum photonic chips for the past six years, are now working on scaling up the complexity of this device, and see this technology as the building block for the quantum computers of the future.“In order to build a quantum computer, we not only need to be able to control complex phenomena such as entanglement and mixture, but we need to be able to do this on a chip, in much the same way as the modern computers we have today,” says Professor Jeremy O'Brien, Director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics. ”Our device enables this and we believe it is a major step forward towards optical quantum computing.”

“It isn’t ideal if your quantum computer can only perform a single specific task”, explains Peter Shadbolt, lead author of the study, which is published in the journal Nature Photonics.  “We would prefer to have a reconfigurable device which can perform a broad variety of tasks, much like our desktop PCs today – this reconfigurable ability is what we have now demonstrated. This device is approximately ten times more complex than previous experiments using this technology.”
Source: http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2011/8109.html