IBM announced they took two different approaches, both of which played a significant part in the breakthrough they revealed. The first one was to build a 3-D qubit made from superconducting, microfabricated silicon. The main advantage here is that the equipment and know-how necessary to create this technology already exists, nothing new has to be invented, thanks to developments made by Yale researchers (for which Steffen expressed a deep admiration). Using this approach, they managed to maintain coherence for 95 microseconds 'But you could round that to 100 for the piece if you want,' Steffen joked.
The second idea involved a traditional 2-D qubit, which IBM's scientists used to build a 'Controlled NOT gate' or CNOT gate, which is a building block of quantum computing. A CNOT gate connects two qubits in such a way that the second qubit will change state if the first qubit changes its state to 1. The CNOT gate was able to produce a coherence of 10 microseconds, which is long enough to show a 95% accuracy rate a notable improvement from the 81% accuracy rate, the highest achieved until now. Of course, the technology is still years away from being actually on the shelves, but the developments are very impressive