News Archive 2022

June 30, 2022 Chicago’s Duality Quantum Accelerator Selects Its Second Cohort Chicago’s Duality Quantum Accelerator has selected its second set of Cohort 2 startup companies for the next 12 month program starting on July 11, 2022. In addition, Duality reported significant success with the companies comprising Cohort 1, which has just finished its program. Click here to see more about which companies were selected and the benefits they receive by participating in this program.

June 29, 2022 - News Brief Planqc Secures €4.6 Million ($4.82M USD) Funding Round for Development of a Neutral Atom Based Quantum Computer Munich based planqc is a spinout from the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics and Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich that is developing a room temperature quantum computer based on neutral atoms trapped in optical lattices. The financing round wasled by UVC Partners and Speedinvest. The company is the first startup to emerge from the Munich Quantum Valley. They are joining other startups developing room temperature quantum computers based upon neutral atoms controlled by lasers including ColdQuanta, Atom Computing, Pasqal, and QuEra. The company has indicated that they have already routinely trapped and controlled more than 2000 atoms in their optical lattice simulators at the Max-Planck-Institute. For more information, you can view a press release available here and also a technical paper about their neutral atom technology authored by one of the company’s founders and posted on arXiv here.

June 28, 2022 - News Brief SEMI Japan Forms a New Quantum Computer Council The Semiconductor Industry Association of Japan (SEMI Japan) has formed a new council with a purpose of to promote communication and information sharing between SEMI member companies and those involved in quantum computers regarding quantum computers. The initial members include ten domestic semiconductor supply chain companies and research institutes and organizations with additional members expected to join in the future. The members of SEMI Japan decided to form this council because they expect that semiconductor manufacturing technology will be key for building quantum computers in the future. Additional information is available in a news release (in Japanese) issued by SEMI Japan that can be seen here.

June 27, 2022 - News Brief Rigetti and Riverlane Receive a £500 Thousand ($613K USD) Grant to Work on Error Correction Rigetti Computing and Riverlane have received this grant from Innovate UK, the UK’s national innovation agency, to study syndrome extraction on superconducting quantum computers. This would be a critical step for providing error correction on the qubits in a fault tolerant quantum computer. Since a qubit cannot be measured directly without collapsing quantum error correction circuits have to be made more complex than their classical counterparts. A common method is to include additional qubits in the circuit called ancilla (or auxiliary) qubits that can be entangled with the data qubits and subsequently measured to form a syndrome pattern. This syndrome pattern can indicate if there is an error within the data qubits and what qubits are affected. Additional gates can then be applied to the data qubits based upon the syndrom to fix the data qubits and correct the errors. This research from Rigetti and Riverlane will explore ways of implementing this error correction process while minimizing any additional errors that could result from the syndrome extraction process itself. The beauty of this approach is that while the ancilla qubits are measured the data qubits are not measured so they remain in the quantum state and don’t collapse. For more about this grant and research project, you can view a press release located here.

June 23, 2022 - News Brief IonQ Collaborates with GE Research to Study Risk Modeling on Quantum Computers Mathematicians have worked for many years to develop mathematical tools for modeling joint probability distributions with multiple variables. These techniques can be particularly valuable in areas such as finance where it is quite helpful to understand the correlations between three and four stock indexes to help predict future performance. One of the tools that mathematicians use is called a copula which was originally introduced in 1959. Recently, quantum researchers have found a way to express copulas as maximally entangled quantum states on a quantum computer. Together IonQ and GE Research modeled stock prices using this technique with up to four index variables on a hybrid computing confirmation that included both IonQ’s Aria quantum processor and a classical computer. Their results achieved comparable, and in some cases better, outcomes than classical copula modeling. The quantum approach should have an easier time scaling up to support more variables than the classical approach. So we would expect greater quantum advantages as the problems get larger. And this technique of risk modeling is by no means limited to the finance area. Other areas where this could potentially be used include product design, factory operations, supply chain management, and many others. For more information about this research you can view a news release from IonQ here, a blog article with additional detail here, and a technical paper with even more technical details here.

June 22, 2022 Silicon Quantum Computing Demonstrates an Analog Quantum Processor Chip Using Their Quantum Dot Technology Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) has announced their first analog quantum processor chip that has been specifically designed to accurately model the quantum states of a small, organic polyacetylene molecule. The device consists of placing 10 quantum dots made out of phosphorus atoms that are controlled by 6 electrodes. The electrodes can precisely control the position of the quantum dots to mimic the bonds and energy levels of the carbon atoms in the polyacetylene molecule. This device can then act as an analog model to the molecule itself. And by injecting it with current and measuring the results they can predict how the actual molecule would behave. Click here for our full story.

June 21, 2022 - News Brief Rigetti Switches on their UK Quantum Computer In a project funded by the UK government’s Quantum Technologies Challenge led by UK Research & Innovation, Rigetti has launched its a 32-qubit Aspen-series system and has made it accessible to Rigetti’s UK partners over the cloud through the Rigetti QCS™ cloud platform.This project was first announced in September 2020 with £10M ($13.35M USD) in funding and includes Rigetti’s UK partners Oxford Instruments, University of Edinburgh, Phasecraft, and Standard Chartered Bank. The partners will be using the machine to further their research into quantum algorithms and applications in areas including machine learning, materials simulation, and finance. Rigetti also announced they and their partners have received two different Innovate UK awards as part of the ISCF Commercialising Quantum Technologies Challenge. The first is a project with Riverlane to research syndrome extraction for use in error correction algorithms. The second is with Phasecraft and BT to research algorithms for solving optimization and constraint satisfaction problems. Rigetti’s press release announcing the launch of their UK quantum processor is available here.

June 21, 2022 Keysight Introduces a New Quantum Control System for Use in Quantum Processors Keysight has developed a new modular Quantum Control System that provides high levels of signal accuracy using a technology called Direct Digital Synthesis. A key specification for the new Keysight system is that of phase noise they have been able to reduce to a very low level of less than 130 dBm. The system is configurable with multiple modules that can be inserted into an 18 slot chassis with functionality that can synchronize multiple modules or multiple chassis together to act as one unit. The system also includes a Quantum-specific Python API software package that provides for Static System Configurations, Device Calibration Manager, Waveform and Data Visualization Tools and other tools that the company asserts is easy to use. Our full article with additional information about this new system is available here.

June 21, 2022 Amazon Web Services Adds a Fourth Quantum Initiative for Quantum Networking With a significant portfolio of efforts to provide product and services for the quantum computing market, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now expanding its quantum initiatives and adding a new AWS Center for Quantum Networking (CQN) to develop offerings for the quantum networking market. Although specific products from this group have yet to be announced, the will be investigating a wide range of quantum networking and quantum security products that will include hardware, software, as well as various quantum resistant encryption offerings. Click here for more.

June 20, 2022 Quantum Computing Inc's QAmplify Can Expand Today’s Processing Power by Up to 20 Times for Certain Problems Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI) has launched its QAmplify suite of quantum software that is able to dramatically expand or amplify the processing power of any current quantum computer. QAmplify uses AI-Machine learning to amplify the effective number of qubits that they can claim in hardware. So far, QCI’s 5x to 20x results were obtained via internal benchmark and it is now validating the algorithm from a 3rd party perspective. Click here for the full article.

June 19, 2022 - News Brief Amazon Braket Now Supports Qiskit Programs AWS has announced that they are now support a Qiskit-Braket-Provider that will allow programs written on the Qiskit SDK to be run on any of AWS gate level machines attached to Braket including machines from Rigetti, IonQ, Oxford Quantum Circuits as well as as well as Braket’s on-demand simulators: SV1, TN1, and DM1. Qiskit is a very popular quantum programming language initially developed to support the IBM Quantum processors and this capability will now allow users to take existing algorithms and try them out on a variety of different machines. Utilizing this capability will only require adding a few lines of code to your Qiskit program. Additional information on how to use this new capability is included in a blog post on the AWS website here.

June 18, 2022 Who’s News: Management Updates at Zapata, ColdQuanta, Quix, and Quantum Delta Zapata Computing has added a new member to their Board of Directors. ColdQuanta has recruited a new VP of Corporate Development, Quix has hired a new CEO, and Quantum Delta has added an executive to lead their quantum sensors program. Click here to read the details about the new additions to these respective organizations.

June 17, 2022 OVHCloud Partners with Atos and Quandela to Provide Additional Quantum Services We reported last month that Pasqal is now partnering with OVHCloud to provide beta access to the Pasqal 100 qubit neutral atom processor. OVHCloud is now adding support for the Atos quantum emulator and Quandela’s Percival open-source photonic QPU simulator. OVHCloud is the largest cloud hosting service in Europe and has a fleet of 300,000 servers at 32 data centers in 19 countries. For the rest of the article, click here.

June 16, 2022 Chicago Quantum Exchange and Toshiba Complete their Initial Installation of a Quantum Network in the Chicago Area We reported in April that the Chicago Quantum Exchange and Toshiba were building a 35 mile (56 km) quantum link between Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. They have now completed this link and have added it to the 89 mile (144 km) quantum loop that Argonne had previously installed creating a total network spanning 124 miles (200 km) which is the largest quantum network currently deployed in the United States. This expanded network will have six nodes and including nodes at Argonne in suburban Lemont, Illinois, and the University of Chicago and the Chicago Quantum Exchange headquarters, both on the South side of Chicago. See our full article and a map showing the network configuration here.

June 16, 2022 D-Wave Unveils Its Zephyr Technology for the Future Advantage2 7000 Qubit Quantum Annealer At its Qubits 2021 Conference last October, D-Wave disclosed that it was developing its sixth generation quantum annealing processor codenamed Advantage2. This processor is expected to be released in 2023-2024 with about 7,000 qubits, improved performance, and an increased qubit connectivity to 20 from the previous 15. D-Wave has now named this 20-qubit topology as the Zephyr topology. As part of the development process, D-Wave has completed a 500+ qubit small-scale Advantage2 prototype that employs a new qubit design, significantly lower noise, and the 20-qubit connectivity. Click here for more.

June 14, 2022 - News Brief Quantinuum Upgrades their Ion Trap Processor to 20 Fully Connected Qubits Quantinuum has announced that they have upgraded their H1-1 processor from 12 to 20 qubits. This new upgrade maintains the gate fidelities of the previous version but it increase the number of zones from 3 to 5, which will allow more parallel operations to occur simultaneously. The processor has been under beta test for the past month or so with JP Morgan Chase as a lead end user testing int out. JP Morgan Chase has just published a paper on arXiv titled Constrained Quantum Optimization for Extractive Summarization on a Trapped-ion Quantum Computer. The paper reports that this experiment used a circuit used all 20 qubits and had a total of 765 two-qubit gates with a maximum two-qubit gate depth of an impressive 159 levels. This H1-1 processor is now available to more users via Microsoft Azure and Quantinuum’s own cloud circuit. Quantinuum indicated that they will be upgrading their second machine, codenamed H1-2, to the same 20 qubit level later this year. Additional information about this upgrade is available in a press release posted on Quantinuum’s website here and also a product page for the processor here.

June 13, 2022 - News Brief evolutionQ Receives $5.5 Million in Series A Funding evolutionQ, a Waterloo, Canada startup providing quantum-safe cybersecurity products and services has received a $5.5 Million (USD) funding round from Quantonation and The Group Ventures. Their key product is called BasejumpQDN, which is software that helps to integrate quantum-safe technologies such as QKD with an enterprises network to protect from threats. The company also provides services for enterprises concerned about the quantum cryptographic threat including risk assessments, network verifications, product verifications, and strategy workshops. They will be using the funds for continued product development, expand their service offerings, and grow their sales and support in North America and Europe. You can access evolutionQ’s news release announcing this new funding in a post on their website here.

June 12, 2022 - News Brief University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) Joins the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA) UIC will join 24 other partner institutions participating in C2QA and will represent the sixth minority serving institution. UIC, located in the heart of Chicago serves a substantial minority population and is also the city’s only public research university. They recently hired Thomas Searles, UIC associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the College of Engineering, to increase the university’s capability for teaching and researching quantum technology. Professor Searles’ lab is currently applying machine learning methods towards error mitigation in Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. He also has recently been studying quantum state tomography on the IBM machines and other platforms and looks forward to increasing opportunities in his lab. C2QA, led by the Brookhaven National Laboratory, is one of five U.S. Department of Energy-funded centers that are focused on the advancement of quantum information science and technology. C2QA has a particular mission of research ways to accelerate the achievement of quantum advantage, the ability to solve real-world problems beyond what is capable by a classical computing. For more on UIC’s and C2QA’s quantum activities, you can view press releases announcing this development from UIC here and another one from Brookhaven Lab’s Quantum Center here.

June 11, 2022 - News Brief U.S. and Denmark Issue Statement of Cooperation on Quantum Information Science and Technology The United States and Denmark have agreed to cooperate on activities related to quantum technology. This cooperation will include establishing inclusive scientific research communities, collaborating workshops, seminars, and conferences, creating collaboration opportunities within academic institutions, industry consortia, and major laboratories, promoting dialogue to encourage the formation of collaborative networks, promoting the commercialization of the technology by enabling opportunities to build a trusted global market and supply chain, and developing the next generation of quantum scientists and engineers. This statement is similar to ones that the U.S. has also signed with the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Finland, and Sweden. You can access the full statement of cooperation on the U.S. Department of State website here.

June 11, 2022 - News Brief FormFactor Acquires JanisULT’s Dilution Refrigerator Product Line Formfactor, a leading semiconductor test and measurement supplier, has acquired the cryogen-free Dilution Refrigerator (DR) product line from JanisULT. The products consist of three models, JDry-250, JDry-500, and JDry-600 which represent different levels of cooling power and are immediately available now. With this acquisition, FormFactor is now the largest manufacturer of dilution refrigerators in the United States. The fridges have the capability of cooling down to sub-10 millikelvin temperatures and will join other FormFactor offerings for the quantum market including high-throughput wafer and chip-scale cryogenic probers, adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator (ADR) cryostats for qubit prescreening, cryogenic RF and DC probe interfaces, and cryogenic test services at their Advanced Cryogenic Lab. Additional information about these products can be found in a press release available here and also a product brochure located on the FormFactor website here.

June 10, 2022 - News Brief Qubit Pharmaceuticals Raises €16 Million ($16.8M USD) in Seed Round Financing Qubit Pharamaceuticals, a Paris, France based company specializing in finding efficient solutions for computational drug discovery, has raised €16 Million in financing from XAnge, Omnes, Quantonation and Mr. Octave Klaba, founder of OVH. This brings total funding the company has received so far to over €23 million ($24.2M USD). The funds will be used to further develop the company’s Atlas software platform which leverages supercomputers and quantum computers to accelerate the development of more effective and safer drug candidates. The company has the aim of speeding drug candidate selection by a factor of 2X and reducing investment cost for drug discovery by a factor of 10X. They are a spin-off of research conducted at leading research institutions including CNAM, CNRS, University of Texas at Austin, Sorbonne University and Washington University. Qubit Pharmaceuticals has posted a news release with additional details that can be accessed on their website here.

June 10, 2022 - News Brief Quantropi Introduces SEQUR™ SynQK Powered by QiSpace™ for Quantum Secure Digital Key Distribution SEQUR SynQK is a scalable end-to-end platform for exchanging quantum secure digital keys between two parties. A key strength of this technology is its ability to exchange keys for very long distances at high data rates which they say provides advantages over alternate approaches of true QKD or other PQC algorithms, such as the ones being reviewed by NIST. In benchmark tests Quantropi performed with Deutsche Telekom and the Calian Group they demonstrated the ability to deliver at least 5 simultaneous quantum secure key streams over distances ranging from 4,000 to 15,000 KM at speeds ranging from 130 to 190 megabits per second. The company has a strategy of providing products that provide conform to three key principles of Trust, Uncertainty, and Entropy – or “TrUE”. Additional information about Quantropi’s release of the SEQUR project is available in a news release posted on the Quantropi website here and a product page for the SEQUR Quantum Entropy Services that can be viewed here.

June 9, 2022 - News Brief QuantWare Receives a €7.5 Million ($8M USD) Award from the European Innovation Council QuantWare, a Delft Netherlands, company that develops superconducting quantum processor chips was given this aware as part of a competitive new EIC Accelerator “enhanced pilot” program. The company will be using these funds to scale their processor chips to higher qubit counts. QuantWare provides these chips to organizations wishing to build up their own quantum computers using components obtained from different sources. QuantumWare has recently established partnerships with QuantrolOx to integrate their control software with QuantWare hardware and also QphoX to provide a way of networking quantum processors. You can access a news release announcing this award on the QuantWare website here.

June 9, 2022 Orca Computing Raises $15 Million and Provides a Small Quantum Processor to the UK’s Ministry of Defence Orca Computing has raised $15 million in Series A funding from venture firms Octopus Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Quantonation, and Verve Ventures. They will be using the funds to further develop their room temperature, photonic based quantum processor. In other news, the company announced that the UK’s Ministry of Defence has acquired a small rack mounted processor called the PT-1 to explore how quantum computing can be utilized for defense applications. Click here for our full article that discusses both developments.

June 8, 2022 - News Brief qBraid Integrates Support for Pasqal into its qBraid Lab Platform qBraid is a Hanover, New Hampshire based quantum software startup and a graduate of the first cohort of Chicago’s Duality Quantum Accelerator. They provide a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform called aBraid Lab for accessing quantum software and hardware from multiple vendors including Amazon Braket, IBM Qiskit, Xanadu Pennylane, Google Cirq, and Rigetti pyQuil. qBraid Lab provides a simple cloud environment to write quantum code, compatible across all quantum hardware, and interoperable with all quantum algorithm development tools without requiring additional software setups on your own computer. And now they have added support for the Pulser SDK from PASQAL. Pulser is an open-source software package used for programming neutral-atom devices at the pulse level. The Pasqal processor is the first neutral atom machine supported by qBraid and the Pulser software can provide quantum control for both in the digital and analog modes available in the Pasqal processor. For more on their support for Pasqal, you can view a press release posted the qBraid website here.

June 7, 2022 Covestro and QC Ware Agree to Work Together on Quantum Algorithms for Materials Simulation The two companies have signed a five-year agreement to co-design quantum algorithms for applications in materials science and beyond. Although Covestro and QC Ware are currently working on proof-of-concept (POC) models using the machines available today, the companies believe that the algorithms they are developing will be usable to solve real-world problems (i.e. achieve Quantum Advantage) once processors with 200-500 qubits are available. Click here for the rest of the article.

June 5, 2022 - News Brief Pasqal Opens Offices in Boston, Massachusetts and Sherbrooke, Canada Pasqal is working hard to expand its enterprise customer base. They recently disclosed they are already working with Johnson & Johnson, LG, Airbus, BMW Group, EDF, Thales, MBDA and Credit Agricole CIB. And now they are making investments to find more business in North America. We reported last month that they had hired Catherine Lefebvre, as Vice President Strategic Business Development North America. Catherine will be based at Pasqal’s new Boston office. They have also announced the opening of a new Canadian office in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada in what is known as the Quantum Innovation Zone. Sherbrooke and the surrounding area have an active quantum ecosystem including the Université de Sherbrooke. The new Sherbrooke office will be set up as a subsidiary known at Pasqal Canada and will be working on collaborations with academia as well as developing new commercial applications. More about Pasqal’s expansions in North America is available in a news release posted on Pasqal’s website here.

June 4, 2022 NSF to Provide Supplemental Funding for Quantum Computing Platform Access The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” offering supplemental funding for currently active NSF awards to support quantum research using quantum cloud resources available from IBM Quantum, Microsoft Quantum, and Amazon Braket. Each funding request could be for an amount of up to $50,000 which would pay for the costs for the use of quantum simulators and hardware platforms as well as support for a graduate student for a period of one year. Click here for more.

June 3, 2022 - News Brief University of Maryland’s Quantum Startup Foundry Now Accepting Applications to their 2022 Pre-traQtion Program The Quantum Startup Foundry’s Pre-TraQtion Program draws entrepreneurs who are building Quantum-focused ventures and are looking for grant funding. The Pre-TraQtion Program is ideally valuable for early stage founders looking to commercialize their technology, build their companies, and engage the US Government for funding. The program helps companies navigate the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs for specific topics related to quantum technologies. The program will run from July to October 2022 and the final deadline for submitting an application is June 30, 2022. Additional information is available on the website of the Quantum Startup Foundry here and the link to the page for applying to the program can be accessed here.

June 2, 2022 Xanadu’s Borealis Processor and Classiq’s Quantum Algorithm Design Platform Are Now Integrated with Amazon Braket Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that Xanadu's Borealis process is already connected and available for us on their Braket quantum cloud service. As recently mentioned in a previous article, this device has demonstrated quantum supremacy using a Gaussian Boson Sampling (GBS) demonstration and it does represent the first publicly available machine that has achieved this. Also Classiq has announced that it has integrated support for AWS Braket in its Quantum Algorithm Design Platform. The integration allows the Classiq platform to be used with any of the gate-based processors attached to Braket, except for the just released Xanadu Borealis processor. See our full article describing both of these announcements here.

June 2, 2022 - News Brief Menten AI Using Nvidia’s cuQuantum to Support Its Drug Discovery Work Nvidia has disclosed that Menten AI is using its cuQuantum’s tensor network library to simulate protein interactions and optimize new drug molecules. Like many quantum early adopters, Menten AI is investigating the use of quantum technology to accelerate the computationally expensive simulations used in classical computing for protein and peptide design. But the challenge is that today’s quantum processor are not really powerful enough to provide useful results. However, the processors are continuing to improve at a fast pace and it is likely they will become powerful enough to provide quantum advantage and provide solutions that cannot be achieved using classical computing. However, by using a high performance quantum simulator like the Nvidia GPU’s and cuQuantum software library, they can develop quantum algorithms and test them before the larger machines are available. Menten AI may even be able to achieve early results in their protein simulation work using cuQuantum but will certainly be ready to scale up and use those same algorithms on the larger machines when they are available. Additional information can be found in an Nvidia blog available here which describes cuQuantum and Menten Ai’s usage to help in drug discovery.

June 2, 2022 - News Brief QuantWare and QphoX Partner to Provide a Way of Networking Superconducting Quantum Processors QuantWare is collaborating with another subsystem supplier. In May, we reported on a partnership between QuantWare and QuantrolOx to provide machine learning based qubit control software for QuantWare’s superconducting processor chips. This time they are partnership with QphoX to provide ways of networking multiple quantum processors together into a mini quantum internet. This approach is gaining popularity because Rigetti is already doing this with their 80 qubit Aspen-M processor and plans to expand upon this with their future 336 qubits machine. Also, IBM announced plans to do this in the future in their latest roadmap release. The key component that QphoX will be contributing to this effort is their Quantum Modem™, a quantum transducer that will couple microwave and optical photons through a mechanical intermediary resonator. Additional information about this collaboration can be seen in a news release available on the QuantWare website here.

June 1, 2022 - News Brief Singapore to Invest S$23.5 Million ($17.16M USD) Into Three Quantum Research Programs The funds will support three different programs over a period of about 3.5 years. The first is the National Quantum Computing Hub (NQCH) which will develop quantum computing hardware and middleware, host a quantum computing facility at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore, and research applications with industry collaborators in applications for areas such as finance, supply chain, and chemistry. The second program is a National Quantum Fabless Foundry (NQFF), hosted at A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE). This facility will provide micro and nano fabrication services for quantum devices being designed by the Singapore quantum research community. The third program is the National Quantum-Safe Network (NQSN). This network will initially include 10 network nodes to be installed across Singapore connected to fiber, including two at NUS, two at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), a node at Horizon, and others at government and private company premises. This quantum network program will be funded with $8.5 million Singapore dollars ($6.3M USD) over a three-year period. The main goal of the NQSN will be to develop a means to provide robust cybersecurity for critical infrastructure including communication systems for governments, critical infrastructure such as energy grids, and companies handling sensitive data in areas such as healthcare and finance. For more information about these investments by Singapore, you can view a news release available here on the website of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies.

June 1, 2022 Xanadu Launches Borealis, a 216 Squeezed-state Qubit Photonic Processor Xanadu, a Toronto based quantum computing startup, has released their Borealis processor and has made it available on the Xanadu Cloud. They will also make it available soon on the Amazon Braket cloud service. In addition, Xanadu has demonstrated Quantum Supremacy with this device by running a Random Number Sampling experiment on it use Gaussian Boson Sampling. Click here for the rest of the article.

May 31, 2022 - News Brief Quantum Brilliance Installs a Quantum Computer at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia The quantum processor that has been installed by Quantum Brillance at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is a small processor primary intended for to test how it can be integrated within a hybrid classical/quantum architecture as a quantum accelerator with the Setonix, Pawsey’s new state-of-the-art HPE Cray Ex supercomputer. The team at Pawsey will be using the system to explore hybrid algorithms as well as collect and optimize operational data for such things as diagnostics, maintenance data and cycles. This program was announced last year but took a little longer than initially planned due to Covid-related delays. The Quantum Brilliance processor is unique among the many quantum processors now available because it uses an NV diamond-based technology and operates at room temperature. Additional information about this installation can be found in a news release posted on the Pawsey website here as well as a video available on YouTube here.

May 30, 2022 - News Brief Pasqal Reaches Agreement to Provide Two 100 Qubit Quantum Simulators to the European HPCQS Project HPCQS is a European consortium funded by the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) to integrate two 100 qubit quantum simulators to two existing European Tier-0 supercomputers and provide cloud access to public and private European users. The HPCQS project is lasting four years, has a 12 million Euro ($12.9M USD) budget with 15 partners in six countries. Pasqal has been chosen to provide two of their 100 qubit, neutral atom base Fresnel quantum simulators at the Joliot –Curie of GENCI, operated at CEA/TGCC, and the JUWELS modular supercomputer at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). The Fresnel processors will be used in a hybrid classica/quantum configuration with supercomputers to act as a quantum accelerator for specific workloads in optimization, quantum chemistry and machine learning. On-site installation of the Fresnel processors at the two sites is scheduled for the second half of 2013, but in the meantime HPCQS users will have cloud access to the machine located in Pasqal’s facilities. Additional information about this is available in a news release provided by Pasqal that can be accessed here.

May 29, 2022 PsiQuantum Sets Up a Qlimate Subsidiary to Use Quantum Computing for Combating Climate Change In an announcement at the 2022 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, PsiQuantum announced it is setting up a new subsidiary called Qlimate devoted to using quantum computing to help solve the many computational problems associated with developing solutions for climate change. PsiQuantum is developing a large-scale error corrected quantum computer (see our in-depth description of their technical approach here) which they believe will be the world’s first utility-scale quantum computer. As part of this Qlimate announcement PsiQuantum has committed to provide substantial capacity on this machine for the Qlimate initiative. Click here for more.

May 28, 2022 Who’s News: Management Updates at D-Wave, ColdQuanta, and Zapata Computing D-Wave and ColdQuanta have announced updates to their Board of Directors and Zapata has named a Chief Revenue Officer. Click here to find out more about these new appointments.

May 28, 2022 - News Brief QuantWare and QuantrolOx Partner to Ease the Integration of the Control Software With the Hardware Device QuantWare is a company that provides QPU chips to customers who want to build up their own quantum computer. QuantrolOx is a company that provides automated machine learning based control software to provide optimum control of qubits. The two companies have announced a partnership to integrate QuantrolOx’ software with QuantWare’s hardware to create an open architecture quantum computer solution for customers who want to build their own machine. QuantWare asserts that by working with themselves and their partners a customer can create a quantum computer on their own for 1/10th the cost of purchasing a complete system from one of the hardware vendors. Additional information about this partnership can be found in a news release posted on the QuantWare website here.

May 27, 2022 Quantum Catalyzer (Q-Cat) Launches with a Mission to Create and Nurture New Quantum Startups Sometimes there are technologies that are brewing in an academic lab somewhere and the researchers are unaware that these technologies could be applied to real world problems for commercial benefit. What Quantum Catalyzer (Q-Cat) does is to search for these technologies and to create and support new startups that will commercialize the technology. Borrowing a term from the chemistry world, they see themselves as the “catalyst” that will find a quantum related technology, find the applications and users that need it, and mix the two together to create the new company that will bring the new solution to market. Click here for the rest of the article.

May 25, 2022 - New Brief IBM Further Improves Their Quantum Volume to 512 IBM has achieved a Quantum Volume of 512 on their quantum processor codenamed Prague. This uses a circuit of 9 qubits that is 9 levels deep. IBM had previously announced in April that this Prague processor had achieved a Quantum Volume of 256 and they have further optimized it to achieve the higher number. The processor uses a new architecture that IBM calls Falcon R10 that will be the basis of some of the new chips, such as the future Heron processor, announced in their roadmap update earlier this month. The architecture provides higher gate fidelity and lower crosstalk. You can see additional information including detailed data on each of the qubits in the circuit in a Tweet posted by Jay Gambetta here.

May 25, 2022 Quantum Computing Inc. to Acquire Quantum Photonic Startup QPhoton In another pairing between hardware and software companies, Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI) has reached an agreement to acquire quantum photonic startup QPhoton. QPhoton is a spinout of research by Dr. Yuping Huang from the Stevens Institute of Technology and will operate as a subsidiary of QCI. The two companies had previously announced a partnership in February to jointly sell and market quantum and phonic products and had indicated at that time that an acquisition may occur. Click here for more details about this transaction.

May 24, 2022 Quantinuum Introduces InQuanto, a Quantum Chemistry Software Platform Quantinuum (formerly Cambridge Quantum) has been working on a quantum chemistry software package for several years aimed at helping computational chemists leverage the power of quantum computers to solve some of their difficult problems. The package was originally called EUMEN during the beta-testing process, but now it has been publicly released under the name InQuanto. The software contains higher level routines that provide a number of key algorithms for complex molecular and materials simulations. InQuanto runs on top of Quantinuum’s TKET software which leverages the hardware agnostic and powerful optimization capabilities already present in TKET. Click here for more details about Quantinuum's new release of the InQuanto software package.

May 23, 2022 Qunnect Awarded $1.85 Million for Quantum Repeater Commercialization Qunnect is developing the technology to create a quantum repeater and last year sold the first unit of one needed component called a Quantum Memory. To help continue their developments and commercialization, the U.S. Department of Energy just awarded Qunnect two SBIR grants totaling $1.85 million. These funds will support commercialization of the photon source and a second type of quantum memory. Click here for the full article.

May 22, 2022 - News Brief Amazon Web Services Joins Q-NEXT Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become a member of the Q-NEXT research consortium. Q-NEXT is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by the Argonne National Laboratory. AWS joins 12 companies, 10 universities and three DOE in this research effort to accelerate progress in quantum information science. Q-NEXT activities will include creating two national foundries for quantum materials and devices, developing quantum networks, forming simulation and network testbeds, and help to train a quantum workforce. Q-NEXT is one of five of the DOE’s National Quantum Information Science Research Centers with each researching different areas of quantum technology. Additional information about AWS joining Q-NEXT can be found in a news release posted on the Argonne National Laboratory website here.

May 21, 2022 - News Brief QuSecure Formally Launches Their Company and First Product, a Cybersecurity SaaS Platform Named QuProtect QuSecure, a Silicon Valley company, a post-quantum cybersecurity company has launched its first product called QuProtect which they call a quantum orchestration platform to provide the first end-to-end solution to deliver quantum resistance against the threat of a quantum computer powerful enough to break the public key encryption algorithms in use today. The product will leverage the NIST approved post quantum cryptography algorithms which are expected to be announced any day now. However, it is also designed to provide easy installation and provide seamless upgrade for managed and non-managed endpoints and devices. The company was launched in 2019, is headquartered in Menlo Park, California and has over 50 employees. Additional information about the launch of the QuSecure company and the announcement of the QuProtect product is available in two different press releases that can be seen here and here.

May 20, 2022 - News Brief NIST Awards SRI International $299,128 for Development of a Quantum Technology Manufacturing Roadmap The funding will support a roadmap that identifies pre-competitive development and supply chain gaps to help maintain U.S. dominance in quantum-related fields to benefit multiple quantum technology application areas. The award was part of NIST’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology Roadmap (MFGTech) Program which provided a total of seven awards in a variety of fields. Additional information about the award and NIST’s MFGTech program can be found in a news release here and a webpage for the MEGTech program here.

May 20, 2022 - News Brief Boeing Pledges $5 Million to Support the UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Quantum Science and Engineering (CQSE) is jointly operated by the UCLA College Division of Physical Sciences and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. They research many different areas of quantum technology, many of which can have great relevance for the aerospace industry. The gift from Boeing follows two recent grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) which awarded $25 million to a consortium of several universities for the Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Present and Future Quantum Computation and also a five-year, $3 million traineeship grant to provide fellowships to twelve doctoral students per year. Additional information about this funding from Boeing is available in a news release posted on the UCLA website here.

May 19, 2022 - News Brief Xanadu Introduces FlamingPy, a Python Library for Simulating Error Correction Codes Major research is now going into developing fault tolerant quantum computers that can withstand the qubit errors inherent in quantum computing. It is a complex task to understand how a particular code might perform and Xanadu has developed the first simulator that can help. The FlamingPy software contains a variety of built-in error correction codes, decoders, and noise models and also allows you to add your own. Once these items have been selected, the software enables a user to simulate and debug the error-correction performance and provide estimates for the fault-tolerant error thresholds. The software also provides a variety of visualization tools to help a user verify the correctness of their implementation. Xanadu will continue to develop this software and will be adding additional noise models, codes, decoders, and backends in the future. More information about FlamingPy is available in a Twitter thread that you can read here and the FlamingPy documentation that can be accessed here.

May 18, 2022 Earnings Releases: IonQ, Rigetti, and Arqit Three notable earnings releases were made in the past few days and it is interesting to review them and see the progress each has made in the past year. For IonQ and Rigetti the releases covered their fiscal Q1 2022 ending on March 31, 2022 and for Arqit it was for their fiscal first half 2022 covering the six month period ending on March 31, 2022. Click here for our report on these three earnings releases.

May 17, 2022 Unitary Fund Introduces Metriq, a Repository for Quantum Benchmark Results Understanding how various quantum computers are performing can be a quite complex task. Not only are there a multitude of different quantum benchmark suites that are proliferating, but it is not always easy to find the results of the tests and compare them against each other. Fortunately, the Unitary Fund has just created service called Metriq that allows users to post in a common place the results of their tests of many different benchmark tests. Click here for the rest of the story.

May 16, 2022 New VC Investments at Classiq, Universal Quantum, and Qunasys Three new venture capital investments have been announced within the past few days. The first is an investment of an additional $3 million in Classiq from strategic investors HSBC, NTT, and Neva SGR. Quantum Exponential, a publicly held investment organization, has invested £450,000 ($551K USD) through an Advanced Subscription Agreement in Universal Quantum. Finally, Mitsubishi Electric’s ME Innovation Fund has announced an investment in Tokyo based QunaSys for an undisclosed amount. Click here for additional details about these investments.

May 15, 2022 - News Brief Quix Delivers a 20 Mode Quantum Photonic Processing Chip for Use with Quantum Dot Light Sources to the European project PHOQUSING We had reported earlier this year that Quix had developed a 12 mode photonic chip that was optimized for at the use near-infrared wavelength range (900-970 nm) compatible with quantum dot light sources. Quix has now developed a larger 20 mode version and delivered it to the European PHOQUSING research project. PHOQUSING is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program. It is coordinated by the Sapienza University of Rome and has a budget of about 3.3 million Euros ($3.44M USD). The project is working to develop useful quantum computation by using a hybrid computational model combine classical and quantum processes. The quantum portion leverages a photonic quantum sampling technique to draw samples from a probability distribution created with linear optical interferometers. More information about this is available in a news announcement available on the PHOQUISING website here.

May 14, 2022 Who’s News: Management Additions at Riverlane, ColdQuanta, QuantWare, Pasqal, Atlantic Quantum, and SandboxAQ There have been a lot of recent hires at quantum companies in the past few weeks. We wish all of them the best of success as they take on their challenging and exciting new roles. Click here for the details.

May 13, 2022 Quantum-South Declares their Air Cargo Optimization Application Ready for Production We had reported in February how Quantum-South had created a prototype quantum application that could optimize how air cargo should be loaded optimally into a freighter aircraft. It is a very complex problem for classical computers because one must take into account many differenttargets and constraints including revenue, priority, center of gravity, shear force and volume, and industry standard weight and balance restrictions. Quantum-South has developed a quantum application that runs on a D-Wave quantum annealer and has now declared their application ready for production use with popular Airbus A330-200F or Boeing 747-400 air freighters. Click here for our full article with additional details about this development.

May 13, 2022 - News Brief Aegiq Closes Seed Round Bringing Total Funding to Almost £4 Million ($4.9M USD) The additional funds that Aegiq received came from Black Quant and Quantum Exponential, as well as private angels. These new investors join previous investors Innovate UK, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Deepbridge Capital. Aegiq is a spin-out of the University of Sheffield that is developing single-photon sources and integrated quantum optics platform for quantum computing and quantum networking applications. The company will be using the funds to grow its core R&D team. Additional information is available in a news release located on the Aegiq website here.

May 12, 2022 Classiq Creates a Coding Competition Designed to Challenger Entrants to Create the Most Optimum Circuits Classiq has announced a coding competition with four different quantum programming problems designed to challenge programmers to create circuits that satisfy the problem using either the fewest gate levels or the fewest number of two qubit gates, depending upon the problem. The purpose is to show what can be accomplished with quantum computers that have a limited number of qubits or other constraints. Our article describing additional details about this contest can be here.

May 12, 2022 IonQ Announces Native Gate Access for Researchers, Issues a Rebuttal to Scorpion Capital, and Will Announce Q1 Financial Results on Monday We have a trio of news items to report on IonQ. The first is an announcement that IonQ is making native gate access available to researchers and developers for both their previous generation 11 qubit and their more advanced Aria processor. IonQ’s founders have issued a response to the 183-page Scorpion Capital report that came out last week. This response is available in a blog posting available on the IonQ website here. And finally, we will get an indication of how IonQ is progressing when they announce their Q1 financial results on Monday, May 16th. Click here for our report on these three news items.

May 12, 2022 D-Wave Updates Its Constrained Quadratic Model (CQM) Hybrid Solver and Also Updates the Quantum Annealer at USC D-Wave hasupgraded its Constrained Quadratic Model Hybrid Solver to handle continuous variables. Previously, this solver could only handle variables that were limited to an integer value. They have also upgraded the quantum annealer located at the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC) at the University of Southern California (USC) to the latest 5000 qubit D-Wave Advantage processor. This machine is the first D-Wave Advantage processor installed in the United States and will also be available for public use through the Amazon Braket cloud service. For here for more details on these announcements.

May 12, 2022 Two Collaborations with the Automotive Industry: BMW/Pasqal and Volkswagen/Terra Quantum wo different collaborations between automotive and quantum companies were announced this week for projects that will work on different problems. The first was announced by Pasqal which will work with BMW to analyze the applicability of quantum computing technology to metal forming applications modeling. The second is between Terra Quantum and Volkswagen Data:Lab which have published two joint research papers describing how hybrid quantum computing can be used in applications in optimization and machine learning. Click here to read our full article about these research efforts.

May 11, 2022 ColdQuanta Acquires Super.tech and Readies the Hilbert Processor for Public Access In another merger between hardware and software companies, quantum technology provider ColdQuanta has acquired software company Super.tech and will establish a branch based in Chicago that will continue to develop quantum software. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. ColdQuanta has also started to make their 100 qubit Hilbert processor available. They have started working with their first beta customer who is running jobs on the machine and collecting data. Coldquanta plans on releasing a technical paper with some of the results of these tests in the coming months. Click here to read more about these developments at ColdQuanta.

May 10, 2022 IBM Extends Roadmap Up to 4,158 Qubits Using Multiprocessing and Advanced Software IBM has extended its quantum processor roadmap and added four additional processors that will be introduced between 2023 and 2025. A key to these developments includes different types of multiprocessing resulting in a 4,158 qubit machine, codenamed Kookaburra, in 2025. Click here for the rest of the story.

May 6, 2022 - News Brief PASQAL Starts to Make their Neutral Atom Processor Available via the Cloud PASQAL Cloud Services is now in private beta hosted on OVHcloud, the leading European cloud provider. Their initial two customers include CA CIB, the Corporate and Investment Banking arm of Crédit Agricole Group and CINECA, an Italian inter-university consortium, which operates one of the world’s most important supercomputing centers. This will be the fully programmable neutral atom processor available to external users that we are aware of, but others are sure to follow later this year. Based upon previous reports, the PASQAL machine will have at least 100 qubits and will have programming support from Pulser, an open-source framework for providing pulse-level control over neutral atom based QPUs. The company also indicated that they will be making the processor more widely available to the public in Q4 2022 and previously announced that they will partner with Microsoft to provide access to the machine via Microsoft’s Azure Quantum service later this year. You can access Pasqal’s press release announcing the start of their private beta program here.

May 5, 2022 AWS Adds Embedded Simulators from Xanadu’s PennyLane Using NVIDIA’s cuQuantum We reported last year on a new announcement from NVIDIA that they had developed a quantum simulation platform called cuQuantum which uses their GPUs to provide a significant improvement in simulation performance versus running them on standard microprocessors. Subsequently, Xanadu developed a GPU-accelerated simulator for PennyLane called lightning.gpu which uses cuQuantum and now Amazon Web Services (AWS) is supporting this combination in their Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs module for supporting classical/quantum workloads. This will allow support for very high performance and error free simulations of hybrid algorithms such as variational quantum eigensolver (VQE), quantum approximate optimization algorithms (QAOA), or quantum machine learning (QML). Click here for the rest of the article.

May 4, 2022 QC Ware Collaborates with Itaú Unibanco to Improve Customer Retention Models There are a lot of potential use cases for quantum computing in the banking industry that have been well publicized including Monte Carlo analysis, portfolio optimization, credit scoring, risk minimization, and many others. But QC Ware and Itaú Unibanco, a bank headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil and the largest in Latin America, announced a collaboration to help better model a new potential application for quantum: customer retention. Click here for more.

May 4, 2022 President Biden Signs Two Executive Orders for Quantum Technology The first Executive Order, Executive Order on Enhancing the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee is to enhance the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Board to place it under direct authority of the White House. The second Executive Order, National Security Memorandum on Promoting United States Leadership in Quantum Computing While Mitigating Risks to Vulnerable Cryptographic Systems, provides an outline of the U.S. government’s plan to address the risks posed by quantum computers to America’s cybersecurity. For more about these two Executive Orders, click here to read our full article.

May 2, 2022 - News Brief SandboxAQ and EY Partner to Bringing Quantum AI Solutions to EY Clients Sandbox, a recent enterprise SaaS company spun off from Alphabet, will partner with EY (Ernst & Young LLP) to offer SandboxAQ’s practical AI and quantum technology solutions along with EY’s systems integration and implementation experience to provide solutions to enterprise businesses. SandboxAQ has application expertise in areas include quantum-resistant encryption platforms, simulation software to accelerate drug discovery, material science development and other high-performance computing tasks. The two organizations working together will allow each organization to leverage their particular areas of expertise and allow the combination to help enterprises address complex business challenges across all industries. This is the second quantum related partnership that EY has announced in the past week. A few days ago, they announced a partnership with BT and Toshiba to start commercial trials of a QKD network in London. You can access a news release from SandboxAQ announcing their partnership with EY here.

April 30, 2022 - News Brief Fermilab Develops a New Generation of Quantum Control Electronics for Improved Size, Performance, and Cost The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) has teamed with the University of Chicago to develop a new open-source design for control electronics for superconducting quantum processors called the Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit (QICK for short). A key differentiator of this design is that it leverages a new FPGA chip from Xilinx called the ZYNQ RFSoC which is highly integrated and includes high-speed DACs, ADCs, programmable FPGA logic, and a conventional microprocessor all in the same package. This new chip allows the control pulses to be synthesized directly at the microwave frequencies. Most other designs will create the control pulses at a lower intermediate frequency and then use a technique called upconversion to change the signal to operate at the microwave frequencies required by the qubits. Because the design uses the highly integrated Xilinx FPGA chip, it can eliminate the upconversion step and associated components. This makes the design faster, smaller, cheaper, and simplifies the calibration process. A low-cost version of the hardware is now available only for universities for educational purposes. Additional information about this QICK control electronics design is available in news release from Fermilab and also a technical paper published in the Review of Scientific Instruments.

April 30, 2022 Quantum QKD Networks Being Set Up in Chicago and London There were two announcements this week of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) networks being built in the London and Chicago metropolitan areas. The first is a partnership between Toshiba and the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) to install a 38 mile (61 km) link from the University of Chicago to the Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago. The second announcement was made by BT (formerly British Telecom) and Toshiba announcing the launch of the first commercial trial of QKD services in London. The first customer will be EY (Ernst & Young) and will connect two of its London sites in Canary Wharf, and near London Bridge. Click here for more.

April 28, 2022 - News Brief IQM Receives a €35 Million ($36.7M USD) Loan for Its Quantum Fabrication Facility The loan was provided to IQM by the European Investment Bank (EIB) to expanding the fabrication facility that they announced last November and to accelerate material research and development of quantum processors. The facility, located in Espoo, Finland, will be Europe’s first quantum-dedicated fabrication and help reduce Europe’s dependency on chips fabricated in Asia. IQM received additional help from EIB Advisory Servicessupport prepare the financing application. IQM had won a contract in November 2020 to deliver a series of superconducting based quantum computers to VTT, a government owned research center in Finland and has already delivered the 5 qubit version. They are working on providing larger systems including a 54 qubit machine within the next couple of years. IQM is the largest quantum startup in Europe and has over 160 employees with offices in Paris, France, Bilbao, Spain, Munich, Germany, and Espoo, Finland. Additional information about this loan is available in a press release posted on IQM’s website here.

April 26, 2022 - News Brief Aalto University Wins a €2.5 Million ($2.66M USD) Grant to Develop a New Type of Superconducting Qubit The award was made by the European Research Council for a project named ConceptQ. It will cover a five year period to research a new superconducting quantum device concept utilizing increased anharmonicity, simple structure, and insensitivity to charge and flux noise. One problem with superconducting qubits is that they can sometimes end up in states other than |0> or |1>, These states are sometimes called Qutrits which could potentially be in a superpositions of three different states denoted as |0>, |1>, and |2>. In current quantum processors, the |2> state is not desired and could cause a loss of qubit fidelity. Aalto’s new qubit design is meant to reduce or eliminate the occurrence of the |2> state which would remove a source of errors and help to increase the accuracy of the calculation. Another aspect of the project will be to develop low temperature cryoCMOS electronics that can be used to control qubits inside a dilution refrigerator. More information about this grant and the ConceptQ project is available in a news release posted available on the Aalto University website here.

April 25, 2022 - News Brief Members of Netherland’s Delft Quantum Ecosystem Receive €550,000 ($594K USD) in Two R&D Grants The first grant was for an amount of €350,000 and was provided by the Province of South Holland. It was given to a research collaboration consisting of collaboration between Orange Quantum Systems, Delft Circuits, and Leiden Cryogenics which are researching the practical application of quantum technology. The second grant was in the amount of €200,000 and was provided to the ImpaQT initiative by Metropolitan Region Rotterdam The Hague and the Province of South Holland. The ImpaQT initiative is working to provide a value chain consisting of componentsd and related services for organizations wishing to build their own quantum computer using components provides by the members of the ImpaQT initiative. Members of the ImpaQT consortium include QuantWare, Demcon, Qu&Co, Orange Quantum Systems, Qblox, and Delft Circuits. Additional information about these grants and the associated programs can be seen in a news release provided by Quantum Delft available here.

April 24, 2022 - News Brief Synergy Quantum Has Closed a Pre-series A Funding Round Synergy Quantum is a started based in Geneva, Switzerland that was formed in 2018 to pursue products in the Post Quantum Encryption (PQE) security area. The amount of the funding round was not disclosed and the only information about the investors were that they consisted of Swiss and international private investors. In their news release Synergy Quantum noted that they are gaining customer traction with three contracts including projects with a Swiss Private Bank for a client communication and data protection app, a research and design project of a post quantum encrypted secure chip with a major European Semiconductor company, and the development of quantum satellite communication with the quantum mission of the Government of India. The company will be using the funds to hire additional personnel and accelerate their marketing activities. Additional information is available in a news release that can be accessed here.

April 22, 2022 - News Brief Who’s News: Management Updates at Quandela, Multiverse, and Rigetti Quandela has hired Jean Senellart as Head of Software Engineering. He had previously held multiple positions at Systran which he originally joined in 1999. A Twitter posting announcing his appointment can be found here. Multiverse Computing has appointed Karina Robinson as Senior Advisor. Robinson is CEO of Robinson Hambro Ltd and a non-executive director on the board of Atlanti, an Anglo-Swiss fund management group based in Geneva. A news release announcing her appointment is available here. And Rigetti has announced the former COO Taryn Naidu has left the company and Eric Ostby has joined the company as Vice-President of Product. Ostby previously was with the Google quantum computing group where he was Senior Product Manager and product lead for quantum computing service and hardware development. The two announcements from Rigetti can be seen here and here.

April 21, 2022 - News Brief Cambridge Quantum Opens a New Office in Germany Cambridge Quantum, a subsidiary of Quantinuum, has opened a new office in Munich, Germany under the legal name of Cambridge Quantum Deutschland (CQD). The location already has a scientific team there that develops algorithms and software to design, simulate, and commercialize quantum materials. The team of scientists will be developing other applications for quantum computing in collaboration with industry, government and academic partners in areas including chemistry, optimization, finance, cybersecurity, quantum machine learning and natural language processing. Additional information can be found in a news release posted on the Quantinuum website here

April 20, 2022 - News Brief ColdQuanta, Riverlane and University of Wisconsin–Madison Demonstrate Algorithms on a Programmable Neutral Atom Quantum Computer Although development activities for programmable neutral atom quantum computers started later than developments in superconducting and ion trap quantum computers, some people see a lot of future potential in this technology due to its long coherence times, identical qubit characteristics, and potential for rapid scaling. But there previously didn’t seem to have been any technical papers published describing someone actually running a quantum algorithm on one of these processors. But now, a team consisting of researchers from ColdQuanta, Riverlane, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been able to implement three different algorithms including preparation of entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states, quantum phase estimation, and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on a six-qubit processor named AQuA located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although a six-qubit processor could not come close to outperforming a classical computer on this level of problems, the techniques developed can form the basis for much larger and more powerful quantum computers in the future that would be able to outperform classical computers and provide a quantum advantage. Indeed, ColdQuanta is preparing a much larger 100 qubit machine that they will offer for cloud access later this year and it will use learnings from the AQuA testbed. Addtional information about this demonstration of algorithms running on a neutral atom process can be found in a press release located here, a preprint paper posted on arXiv here, and a journal article published in Naturehere.

April 19, 2022 IonQ Collaborates with Hyundai on a Quantum Machine Learning Application for Image Classification and 3D Object Detection IonQ’s latest project with Hyundai is to use their Aria quantum computer to help create a machine learning model for use in classifying 43 types of road signs that would be common in mobility situations. Although the training of the model would not occur in the automobile, once the model is created using it could be performed with an on-board classical computer that receives input from an on-board camera and determines if any of the road signs are present in the image. Click here for our full article discussing this project.

April 18, 2022 aQuantum Integrates Its QuantumPath Platform with Amazon Braket aQuantum’s QuantumPath is a quantum software development and lifecycle application platform that provides for the creation, testing, deployment, and reuse of a quantum algorithm. It supports both classical and quantum workloads in a hardware agnostic manner and has now added Amazon Braket to the many other hardware platforms and quantum simulators that it already supports. Click here for more.

April 17, 2022 - News Brief State of Massachusetts is Providing a $999 Thousand Grant to Two Universities for Quantum Research The funds will be provided to the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston) and Western New England University by The Innovation Institute at the MassTech Collective, an organization formed by the Massachusetts government to spur innovation in the state, as part of a matching grant program with a total budget of $1,999,774. The three-year project will also include collaborations with three commercial companies, Millimeter Wave Systems, LLC in Amherst, Cohasset’s Quantum Microwave, and JanisULT, located in Woburn. The funds will be used to install a 20 millikelvin dilution refrigerator for state-of-the-art quantum hardware validation and development at UMass Boston and 50 millikelvin refrigerator at Western New England University to develop cryogenic radio frequency (RF) microwave support hardware for use in prototype quantum computers. Additional details are available in a press release posted on the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s website here.

April 16, 2022 - News Brief Quix Introduces a New Quantum Photonic Processing Chip Optimized for Use with Quantum Dot Light Sources Quix Quantum has added to its photonic processing chip portfolio with a version that is optimized for use at the near-infrared wavelength range (900-970 nm) compatible with quantum dot light sources such as those made with InGaAs materials. Their previous products were optimized for operation in the telecom compatible wavelengths of 1530 to 1565 nm. The chip provides similar functionality to their previous chips and has 12 input modes with a fidelity specification of 98.6% with a mean optical loss of 3.4 db/mode. An advantage of quantum dot light sources is that they have the potential of being integrated on-chip using micropillars or photonic crystals providing a potentially more scalable solution. More information about this new chip can be found in a news release posted on the Quix website here and an arXiv preprint that provides additional technical data here.

April 16, 2022 - News Brief Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Qatar Receives a $10 Million Grant for Quantum Research The grant was received from Barzan Holdings, Qatar’s leading industrial defense provider, and will be used to establish the Qatar Center for Quantum Computing (QC2) at HBKU. The center will conduct research in such areas as quantum computing, quantum cryptography and quantum artificial intelligence (AI). For more, you can view a news release from HBKU that can be found here.

April 16, 2022 - News Brief QpiAI and QuantrolOx Sign MOU to Develop a 25 Qubit Quantum Computer Testbed The two companies will work together to develop this processor and plan on offering it in the European and Indian markets. QpiAI is providing the hardware and software applications software platforms and QuantrolOx will provide the automated tuning and characterization software. QuantrolOx has offices in Oxford, England and Espoo, Finland and QpiAI, which currently has offices in Milpitas, California and Bengaluru, India, is planning on opening a new office in Finland. The 25 qubit processor will be based upon superconducting technology, but the QpiAI plans on eventually developing a 2048 qubit machine using CMOS based spin qubits. Additional information about this effort can be found in a news release that can be seen here.

April 15, 2022 - News Brief QC Ware Wins $1.5 Million Award from Bpifrance to Develop Quantum Software APIs for Deep Learning and Finance The award will help QC Ware expand a quantum software ecosystem in Europe and develop two new APIs for deep learning and finance that will be integrated into QC Ware’s Forge Software as a Service. QC Ware plans on using the funds to hire 10 new software employees in its Paris office within the next three years. This is the second award that QC Ware has won from Bpifrance. In April 2020, QC Ware received an award as part of the BPIFrance’s Concours d’Innovation i-Nov competition. Bpifrance (BPI is the acronym of Banque Publique d’Investissement) is a French government agency previously known as EPIC OSEO which has a mission to favor the growth of the French economy by helping entrepreneurs thrive. You can find QC Ware’s news release announcing this new award here.

April 15, 2022 Quantum Cryptocurrency Simulation Project—What it Shows Multiverse Computing completed a proof-of-concept project with the Bank of Canada using quantum computing to simulate cryptocurrency as a method of payment by non-financial firms. The effort involved simulating the dynamic formation of networks. Depending on the state of the network, firms may want to form/break new connections–in this case, channels of crypto payments. They then looked to find stable states of the network, where no players can form or break any more connections or stable cycles where the network state oscillates between a closed set of states. Click here for the rest of the article.

April 14, 2022 Q-CTRL Unveils Black Opal Pro and a Two-for-One Offer for World Quantum Day Celebrating World Quantum Day, Q-CTRL announced Black Opal Pro, an expanded version of its popular Black Opal interactive quantum computing learning program for beginners. In honor of World Quantum Day, they are also offering two Black Opal Pro annual subscriptions for the price of one from April 14-20, 2022. More details are available here.

April 14, 2022 PsiQuantum Partners with Mercedes-Benz to Research Battery Chemistry Simulation on a Fault Tolerant Quantum Processor There are many groups working on ways of simulating battery chemistry on a quantum computer. It is a difficult problem but one that could have a high payoff as the world converts to electric vehicles and demands more improvements in the batteries capacity to extend the range and reduce the size and weight. Although many of the other groups are trying to see if this can be done with NISQ level computers, PsiQuantum teamed up with Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America to analyze what could be done on a future error-corrected machine. Click here for more.

April 14, 2022 - News Brief Quantinuum Increases Their Quantum Volume to 4096 In December, we reported on Quantinuum announcement that they had reached a Quantum Volume metric of 2048 with a new processor they called H1-2. The H1-2 had 12 operational qubits available, but a Quantum Volume of 2048 meant they had successful passed the test specified by IBM with an 11×11 circuit, (Eleven qubits with eleven gate levels in the circuit). Quantinuum has continued to tweak the performance of the H1-2 and has made additional improvements in this processor and they have successful completed the test using a 12×12 circuit for a Quantum Volume of 4096. The company has been able to consistently double their performance on this metric over the past few years and will no doubt work to double it once again in the future. But the challenge for the next step is they will need to do it with a different chip because they have maxed out on the number of available qubits on the H1-2. We expect they are working on an H2 processor with an increased number of raw qubits in their labs and expect that when they announce a Quantum Volume of 8192, it will be with this new design. You can view Quantinuum’s announcement with some additional technical details in a press release posted on their website here.

April 14, 2022 - News Brief European Project Artemis Launches to Explore Using Neural Networks for Quantum Error Correction and Optimal Control Participants in the three-year project include Quantum Machines, Alice&Bob, and research groups from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. The goal of the project will be to find ways to leverage neural networks to help identify new strategies for quantum control. The project will have several stages. The first stage will use neural networks to determine the appropriate control pulses for creating and manipulating specific qubit states. Following stages will use neural networks to find the best quantum error correction protocols to prepare, measure and act on multiple qubits. This project will leverage the capabilities of Quantum Machine’s pulse processor and programming language which have been optimized for very low latency within the coherence time of the qubits. This is an important requirement for use with error correction algorithms. In addition, the approaches developed during this project will be made available to end users who may want to optimize the use of the neural network routines for their particular application. This neural network routines should also prove to be important for Alice&Bob because they are pursuing development of error corrected machines using a hardware approach called cat qubits. They are planning on delivering their first commercial quantum computer in 2023. You can read more about this project in an announcement provided by Quantum Machines that can be accessed here.

April 13, 2022 IBM Adds Pay-As-You-Go Pricing Model and Expands Qiskit Runtime IBM has introduced a new Pay-As-You-Go pricing model to provide access to sophisticated users with access their higher performance quantum processors without requiring an expensive contractual committment. They have also expanded their Qiskit Runtime environment by adding to new primitives called Sampler and Estimator that that help simplify the use of the system and allow for managed performance. Click here for our full article about these announcements.

April 12, 2022 - News Brief The U.S. and Sweden Agree to Cooperate on Quantum Technology The U.S. and Sweden has also signed a signed a Joint Statement on Cooperation in Quantum Information Science and Technology (QIST). Just a few days earlier, the U.S. had signed a similar agreement with Finland. The Joint Statement advances the shared agendas of both countries to engage in good-faith cooperation in QIST for building a global market and supply chain, and to create respectful and inclusive scientific research communities. In 2018, Sweden established the Wallenberg Centre for Quantum Technology with several universities and industrial partners and is investing 1 billion Swedish Krona ($105M USD) to support advanced research in quantum computing, simulation, communication, and sensing. A news release announcing this signing can be accessed on the U.S. government’s Quantum.gov website here.

April 11, 2022 - News Brief Intel to Provide a Test Bed Quantum Processor to Argonne National Laboratory The machine will be installed later this year at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory which hosts Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center. The Q-NEXT scientists and will use it to test out quantum programs and provide feedback to Intel about the overall operation. Intel has been working on quantum processors using a spin qubit technology built with their advanced manufacturing facility on 300 mm wafers. They presented 14 papers at last month’s APS conference on several aspects of their quantum research including papers on the hardware, software, error correction, and development of a first-of-a-kind cryogenic wafer prober. Although specifics of the machine they intend on installing at Argonne have not been released, we believe it will have a relatively small number of qubits for testing and validating the basic technology. However, Intel’s long-term goal is to leverage their precision manufacturing capabilities to create large fault tolerant machines for use in production applications. Additional information about Intel’s collaboration with Argonne is available in a news release posted on the Argonne website here.

April 10, 2022 - News Brief The U.S. and Finland Agree to Cooperate on Quantum Technology The United States and Finland have signed a Joint Statement on Cooperation in Quantum Information Science and Technology which will promote cooperation in several areas important for the advancement of quantum information science and technology. These activities include maintaining inclusive scientific research communities, cooperating in workshops and conferences, encouraging a broad and inclusive quantum ecosystem, building a trusted global market and supply chain, supporting the development of the next generation of scientists and engineers, and other areas. A press release announcing the signing of the statement can be found here and the statement itself can be accessed here.

April 8, 2022 IBM Improves Their Quantum Volume Performance from 128 to 256 IBM has announced another improvement in their Quantum Volume performance metric to 256 with a new processor they named Prague. The previous leader was a processor named Montreal which had a Quantum Volume measure of 128. Click here for our article that describes this improvement in more detail.

April 7, 2022 Quantum Brilliance Partners with La Trobe University and RMIT University to Research Diamond Quantum Materials The three organizations have created a Research Hub for Diamond Quantum Materials to focus on atom-scale fabrication techniques for nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. Quantum Brilliance is developing quantum processors using what is called an NV diamond technology that involves implanting nitrogen ions into a crystalline diamond structure to create NV centers that form qubits based upon an electron’s spin. Click here for the full article.

April 7, 2022 - News Brief U.S. Government to Provide $25 Million to a GlobalFoundries/PsiQuantum Partnership The funding will be provided by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) through the Air Force Research (AFRL) Laboratory located in Rome, New York. This lab has been designated as the Quantum Information Science Research Center for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force. The funds will be used to accelerate additional investments in new capabilities at GlobalFoundries that are required to develop and build components for PsiQuantum’s photonic quantum computer. The companies expect that most of the funds will be provided in this fiscal year, but the final timeline will be based upon achieving certain milestones. PsiQuantum will also partner with AFRL to advance quantum computing capabilities. To our knowledge, this will be the first partnership that PsiQuantum has had with a U.S. government organization. The Quantum Computing Report recently published an article on A Closer Look at PsiQuantum that can provide more information on PsiQuantum’s overall approach and technology. Additional information about this funding and other quantum funding for the AFRL Rome Lab can be found in a news release provided by the office of U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer that can be found here.

April 6, 2022 - News Brief Pasqal Collaborates with Siemens to Research Quantum Enhanced Computer Aided Design and Testing Pasqal has developed proprietary quantum methods that can accelerate the solution of complex nonlinear differential equations which are often used in creating a digital twin model of various systems in the automotive, electronics, energy and aerospace sectors. Creating a virtual digital twin prototype can save significant amounts of time and cost over constructing a physical prototype to understand how a new design will perform. In particular, Pasqal asserts that that their digital-analog implementation using their neutral-atom processor can be 30 times more efficient for solving these types of problems than using a superconducting quantum processor and have a near-term potential for achieving quantum advantage over classical computing based solutions. This project will be fully funded by Siemens, last for 3.5 years, and include academic partners at Exeter University. Additional information about this collaboration is available in a news release located on the Pasqal website which can be seen here.

April 5, 2022 - News Brief Good Chemistry Company Spins Out of 1Qbit and Receives Seed Funding The Quantum Simulation Division of 1Qbit has spun out and has formed its own independent company called Good Chemistry Company which focusses on utilizing quantum computing for computational chemistry. The key product is called QEMIST Cloud which provides computational chemistry as a service and has been under development for the past three years. The company also announced that it has been collaborating with Dow, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DIC Corporation, and Microsoft with this product. The company also announced receiving seed funding from Green Sands Equity, Accenture, and WorldQuant Ventures. For more information about this company and the seed funding, you can access a news release issued by Good Chemistry here and a second one issued by Accenture here.

April 3, 2022 Who’s News: Management Additions to the Quantum Teams at ColdQuanta, Rigetti, Multiverse, and IonQ In a sign that the industry is continuing to grow rapidly, several companies have announced additions to their management teams to fill out key positions. Click here to read about the newest hires at ColdQuanta, Rigetti, Multiverse Computing, and IonQ.

April 2, 2022 - News Brief U.S. DoD Awards $7.5 Million to a Six University Team to Study Majorana Based Qubits The award was made by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) to a team of six universities led by Professor Javad Shabani of New York University (NYU) and including colleagues from Yale University, the University at Buffalo, the University of Maryland, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The topic’s name is Novel Routes to Majorana Qubits for Topologically-Protected Quantum Information. In theory, Majorana based topological qubits could have superior noise resistance and much lower error rates than other types of qubits. We reported last month about progress made by Microsoft in creating and sustaining a quantum phase with Majorana zero modes and a measurable topological gap. Additional information about this award can be seen in a press release issued by NYU here and also a listing from the DoD’s MURI that includes this program as one of 28 basic research awards they made to academic institutions for Fiscal 2022.

April 2, 2022 DARPA Awards Contracts for the Quantum Benchmarking Program In April 2021, we reported that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had announced funding opportunities were available for a Quantum Benchmarking program and was soliciting proposals for it. The program has goals to create new benchmarks that quantitatively measure progress towards specific computational challenges and also attempt to define the computer hardware necessary to measure benchmark performance. It has now announced that it is awarded contracts to Raytheon BBN, University of Southern California (USC), and a team of five organizations including Aalto University, IonQ, University of Technology Sydney, University of Texas at Dallas, and Zapata Computing. The Raytheon BBN contract was for $2.9 million, the USC contract was for $4.1 million, and the amount for the five member team has not yet been announced. Additional information about the Raytheon BBN and USC awards is available here and a news release from Zapata about their participation in the award can be found here.

March 31, 2022 - News Brief Terra Quantum Extends Their Series A Round Funding to $75 Million We had reported in January that Terra Quantum had raised a Series A venture funding of $60 Million. They have now reported that the funding was extended and an additional $15 million was added to this round bringing the total to $75 million. The funds will be used to strengthen Terra Quantum’s offering around data cryptography and cybersecurity. The company also announced the development of a ferroelectric field-effect transistor with negative capacitance. Although it is not clear if this development would be applicable for a quantum computer, the company indicates it could have an impact in diagnostic imaging in the health care field because it would enable medical diagnostics using terahertz photons that may be less invasive than higher energy photons such as x-rays and UV rays. You can access Terra Quantum’s announcement about the increased Series A funding and the new technical development here.

March 31, 2022 - News Brief Q-CTRL and the Paul Sherrer Institute Partner on Software Tools for Large-Scale Quantum Computing Q-CTRL is an Australian based company that provides software tools for system characterization and hardware optimization of quantum devices using advanced artificial intelligence and automation techniques. Their software works in the domain of control engineering to optimize the pulses that control qubit operations. The Paul Sherrer Institute (PSI) is a Swiss research institution that has partnered with ETH Zurich to form the ETHZ-PSI Quantum Computing Hub. The hub was formed in May 2021 is currently working on investigating quantum processors based on ion trap and superconducting technologies. The goal of this partnership will be for PSI to utilize the Q-CTRL tools for the development and operation of a large scale, error corrected quantum computer. This is needed because as the number of qubits continues to increase, it becomes essential to have automated tools available to efficiently tune-up and calibrate a quantum processor in day-to-day operations. Additional information is available in a news release located on the Q-CTRL website here.

March 30, 2022 - News Brief Quantum Machines Is Acquiring QDevil Quantum Machines, a company located in Tel Aviv, Israel that provides control electronics for quantum processors, has announced it will be acquiring QDevil, a company based in Copenhagen, Denmark that develops and manufactures auxiliary electronics and specialized components for quantum processors. QDevil’s products include ultra-stable voltage sources, sample holders, filters, and breakout boxes and they will serve as the Quantum Machine’s Auxiliary Electronics Division. This combination provides synergy for the companies because many of QDevil’s products are complementary to those offered by Quantum Machines and can be sold to the same customer base. It also provides Quantum Machines with a base in Europe that will be a benefit in recruiting talent, and they plan to leverage that by expanding their teams in Copenhagen. The terms of the deal were not announced, and the acquisition is still pending regulatory approval from the Danish government. Quantum Machines announcement of this acquisition can be found here.

March 29, 2022 Quantinuum Releases an Update to Its λambeq Quantum Natural Language Software Tool We reported last October on a new software product from Quantinuum’s Cambridge Quantum software team called λambeq (pronounced “Lambek”), the world’s first quantum natural language program capability of converting sentences into quantum circuits. This update will make the software more flexible for users by providing a new command line interface and a new neural-based CCG (Combinatory Categorial Grammar) parser named Bobcat, and improvements in the routines that provide a visualization of λambeq’s output as well as expanded documentation. Click here for the rest of the article.

March 28, 2022 - News Brief Qunasys Raises $10 Million in Series B Funding Qunasys is a Tokyo based quantum software company that specializes in providing software for computational chemistry calculations on a quantum computer. Last year, they launched a cloud-accessible quantum computing development platform called Qamuy, a quantum chemistry software service that runs on the cloud and performs calculations on both simulators and real quantum device. The funding round was led by led by JIC Venture Growth Investments (“VGI”), with additional participation from ANRI, Fujitsu Ventures Fund LLC, Global Brain, HPC Systems Inc., JST SUCCESS Program, MUFJ Capital, Shinsei Corporate Investment Limited, and Zeon Corporation. In addition, they also announced business alliances with Zeon Corporation, Fujitsu Limited, and HPC Sytems Inc. Part of the new funding will be to expand their business outside of Japan and open up a base in Europe. You can view Qunasys’ announcement of its new fundraising in a press release located here.

March 28, 2022 IonQ Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Results IonQ announced its fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results with significant increases from earlier periods and also significant increases from their own earlier forecasts. Fourth quarter 2021 revenue was $1.6 million compared to a third quarter revenue of $234 thousand with full year revenue at $2.1 million. IonQ also reported contracts bookings in 2021 at $16.7 million compared with the previous 2021 estimate of $15 million they made in November. Ionq’s EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) loss was $28.3 million with a total net loss of $106.2 million. The net loss was dominated by a Change in Fair value of Warrant Liabilities of $63.3 million and Offering Costs Associated with Warrants of $4.3 million. These are non-cash expenses and are expected to be non-recurring. R&D expenditures in 2021 roughly doubled in 2021 at $20.2 million from the previous amount of $10.2 million in 2020. Click here for the rest of the article.

March 27, 2022 Riverlane-Led Consortium Receives £6.8 Million ($9M USD) For Attacking Error Correction Via Auto-Calibrated ‘Deltaflow Control’ System A UK consortium led by Riverlane, is building an auto-calibrated quantum system to meet the challenges of controlling hundreds of qubits simultaneously across a variety of quantum hardware. In current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, controllable hardware qubits cannot exist with error-free precision. Calibration is inefficient, costly and time consuming, representing a major bottleneck. Without auto-calibration, error correction cannot be scaled. Consortium members are joining to build ‘Deltaflow Control’. Funded by Innovate UK, the £6.8M project (approximately $9M USD), will apply machine learning to identify fast, automated, and scalable ways to implement calibration, maximize hardware performance and accelerate the UK quantum industry. Click here for more.

March 26, 2022 - News Brief Israel’s Weizmann Institute Builds a 5 Qubit Ion Trap Processor The processor is Israel’s first quantum processor and is codenamed WEIZQC as a tribute to Israel’s first classical processor, WEIZAC, which was built with vacuum tubes in 1955. WEIZQC consists of a chain of Strontium ions in a linear trap and is the first step in a program to build a 64 qubit processor within the next one to two years. An interesting feature for us is that this processor already supports a mid-circuit measurement capability that can be used in error correction algorithms and other circuits designed to leverage this capability which is currently only supported by Quantinuum, IBM. A few key technical parameters of this device include a 97.3% two qubit gate fidelity, 200 microsecond gate time, and 2 millisecond coherence time. The ratio between coherence time and gate time is a little low, so additional work will be needed in order to improve these qubit quality measures along with increasing the numbers of qubits for the design to be competitive. Additional information about this effort can be seen in an article published on Israel’s Haaretz website and a technical paper published by the Weizmann team at PRX Quantum.

March 25, 2022 - News Brief CEA and C12 Partner to Build Spin Qubit Chip Based Upon Carbon Nanotubes CEA is a research institute based in Grenoble, France that is one of the world’s largest organizations for applied research in microelectronics, nanotechnology and other advanced technologies. C12 is a Paris, France startup that is developing quantum processor chips using spin qubits in a carbon nanotube. The two organizations are joining forces to create multi-qubit chips at a wafer scale. They are using a two-step process to build the chip. First, CEA builds the underlying gate electrodes and resonators using its 200 mm CMOS fabrication line and then C12 deposits the nanotubes based upon the C-12 isotope of carbon using a chemical vapor deposition process on top of the wafer. C12 asserts that by utilizing ultra-pure carbon nanotubes, their technology can eliminate nuclear spin noise and provide long coherence times while providing high qubit connectivity and easy scalability. (C12 provides a good explanation of how their technology works on their web site here.) The companies will continue to work together and expect to have a final full prototype in 2024. Additional information can be seen in a press release provided by CEA that can be accessed here.

March 24, 2022 - News Brief NEC Developing a Quantum Annealer Using an LHZ Scheme from ParityQC NEC has the goal of developing a quantum annealing processor by 2023 and will use an architecture called LHZ (named after the inventors Lechner, Hauke and Zoller) provided by PartiyQC that will provide for a fully-connected architecture using superconducting parametron qubits. The LHZ unit cell has four qubits and a central coupling circuit which connects them together. This pattern can be replicated with multiple tiles as shown in the diagram above to connect together a larger number of cells. NEC will be using a 3D manufacturing process for building the device and connect it to external devices. NEC has created small structures using the LHZ cell and the 3D manufacturing process and is now working to scale these up to achieve a larger machine. NEC’s work to develop a quantum annealing machine has been funded by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), a Japanese government agency, as part of a Project for Innovative AI Chip and Next-Generation Computing Technology Development. Additional information about NEC’s progress in this project can be seen in a news release available on their web site here.

March 22, 2022 NVIDIA Announces Additional Tools for Quantum Computing Development NVIDIA has just announced three new quantum computing developments at its recent GTC GPU Developers Conference. These include general availability of its cuQuantum SDK, a DGX Quantum Appliance, and a new quantum compiler called nvq++ based upon the QIR intermediate representation langugage. Click here for the full article.

March 22, 2022 SandboxAQ Spun Off as an Independent Enterprise SaaS Company from Alphabet Inc. The team at SandboxAQ was originally formed as an independent research group within Alphabet Inc. (parent company of Google). They have been focusing on developing solutions in both the AI and Quantum domains in such areas as cybersecurity, machine learning, and other advanced areas with a 55 person team that has expertise in such diverse areas as physics, chemistry, AI, neuroscience, cryptography, mathematics and other disciplines. Click here for the rest of the article.

March 21, 2022 Microsoft Will Be Adding Pasqal’s Neutral Atom and IonQ’s Ion Trap Aria Processors to their Azure Quantum Service In two separate announcements, Pasqal and IonQ announced that they will add their latest processors to Microsoft’s Azure Quantum service. Pasqal indicated that they would make their neutral atom based processor available on Azure Quantum in the second half of 2022. In another announcement, IonQ announced that they will make available their latest generation of processor, named Aria, to Azure Quantum customers soon. Our full article reporting on these announcement is available here.

March 20, 2022 - News Brief Penn State Professor Wins $715,000 in Grants from the NSF Professor Swaroop Ghosh of the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has won grants for two separate projects from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) totaling $715,000. The first project will last for three years with funding of $500,000. It will study potential security breaches that could occur in quantum circuits with multi-tenant computing. This is an architecture which would allow multiple users to perform operations while sharing the same hardware. His group will look to develop defenses at both the circuit and system level that can potentially prevent these and other types of security problems. The second project will last for two years with funding of $215,000. The funds will be used to create a hands-on, quantum computing postsecondary curriculum. The curriculum will include hands-on activities that will allow students to create quantum programs, simulate them, and run them on real cloud-based quantum hardware. Additional information about these grants is available in a news release provided by Penn State that can be accessed here.

March 19, 2022 S-4 Registration Statement for D-Wave and DPCM Capital Business Combination Filed An S-4 registration statement is required to be filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for any merger between two companies. It provides a preliminary proxy statement and prospectus in connection with the transaction ahead of shareholder votes to approve the merger. DPCM Capital, a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC), has filed this statement for its proposed merger with D-Wave Systems. Click here to read our full article describing this.

March 16, 2022 - News Brief Chicago Quantum Exchange Adds Four New Corporate Partners The new corporate partners are ASM International (ASM), Atom Computing, EeroQ, and Quantinuum bringing the total number of companies that are partnering with the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) to over 30. Corporate partners will with CQE scientists and students to perform research on advanced quantum technologies and provide training and career opportunities for students that work represent the quantum workforce of the future. ASM is one of the world’s larger providers of semiconductor processing equipment. Atom Computing and Eeroq are quantum hardware startups developing new types of quantum processors. And Quantinuum was recently formed as a merger between the former Honeywell Quantum Systems division and quantum software startup Cambridge Quantum. Quantinuum develops both quantum hardware and the quantum software. For more information about these new partnerships, you can access the news release posted on the CQE website here.

March 15, 2022 Cloud Security Alliance Creates a Countdown to Y2Q Clock Most people are aware that at some point in the future, someone will create a very powerful quantum computer that will be big enough to run Shor’s algorithm and break the RSA public key encryption by factoring a large semi-prime number. Although this is not expected in the near future because it may take something like a 20 million qubit processor to do it, it is likely to happen within the next decade or two. This will require a complete revamping of our current internet encryption infrastructure to replace legacy public key algorithms like RSA with newer techniques using either software-based Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) or physics-based Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). The concern is that this effort will require either upgrading or replacing tens of billions of devices and such an effort will also take a decade or two to complete. So that message is that the IT community should start now on this project or start risking that their communications will be compromised in the future. In order to emphasize the problem, the Quantum-safe Security Working Group of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has set a Y2Q (Years to Quantum) countdown clock to emphasize to people that they have a limited amount of time to do this conversion. They have arbitrarily set the date of April 14, 2030 as the deadline on when this process needs to be completed. Click here for the rest of the article.

March 14, 2022 Colorado Startup Maybell Introduces a New Dilution Refrigerator Colorado startup Maybell (the company was named after the coldest town in the state of Colorado) has introduced their first product, called the Maybell Icebox. They say it has been thoughtfully designed from the ground-up for use in a quantum computer. The company indicates the unit will support three times the number of qubits in one-tenth the physical space. It takes the space of two 19-inch server racks and has several other features that Maybell believes will be welcomed by quantum hardware engineers and researchers. Click here for more.

March 13, 2022 - News Brief German Consortium to Receive €50 Million ($54.5M USD) for Funding to Build a Made in Germany Photonic Quantum Computer The project, named PhoQuant, will be led by Q.ant, a wholly owned subsidiary of TRUMPF, and will include collaborators from 13 other German organizations including Paderborn University (UPB), University of Münster, Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering, University of Jena, Ulm University, HQS Quantum Simulations GmbH, Humboldt University of Berlin, Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems, Swabian Instruments GmbH, TEM Messtechnik GmbH, ficonTEC Service GmbH, FU Berlin, and Menlo Systems GmbH. The program will continue for five years and about 42 million euros of the funds will come from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), with the remainder being funded by the consortium partners. A key goal of the project is to build a made in Germany quantum computer and then making it available worldwide via cloud services. Additional information about this PhoQuant project is available in a blog article posted on the Q.ant site that can be accessed here.

March 13, 2022 - News Brief Denmark to Provide €3 Million ($3.2M USD) to Fund a New Photonic Quantum Computer Development The Innovation Fund Denmark will be supporting this Danish consortium over this four-year program called PhotoQ. Members of this consortium and their contributions will include development of photonic quantum computer hardware via the Technical University of Denmark, technology from NKT Photonics, quantum algorithmic expertise from Aarhus University and Kvantify, quantum chemistry expertise from Molecular Quantum Solutions, and logistics optimization expertise from AMCS Group. As part of the project they will not only develop a quantum computer but explore potential applications where it can offer the greatest possible technological improvements. Additional information about this project is available in a blog post on the NKT Photonics website here and also at the Innovation Fund Denmark website (in Danish).

March 10, 2022 - News Brief German Government Allocates €76.3 Million ($83.9M USD) for QSOLID Program to Create a Superconducting Quantum Processor for the Forschungszentrum Jülich’s Supercomputing Infrastructure The QSOLID program will last for four years and will be led by Forschungszentrum Jülich. The goal will be to develop a superconducting processor with very high quality qubits and integrate it into Forschungszentrum Jülich’s supercomputing infrastructure. The project plans to create and operate at least three different quantum chips in parallel: a “moonshot” system with computing power exceeding that of conventional supercomputers, an application-specific system designed to perform quantum calculations for industry, and a benchmarking platform that prioritizes the development of digital twins and industry standards. The consortium working on this project includes 25 organizations including Forschungszentrum Jülich, Qruise, Fraunhofer, KIT, IPHT, ParityQC, HQS, Rosenberger, Ulm University, PTB, University of Stuttgart, Freie Universität Berlin, IQM, University of Konstanz, University of Cologne, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Supra, ParTec, RI, AdMOS, LPKF, Atotech, Atos, GF, CiS, and ZI. The project has a goal of placing the first demonstrator into operation by mid-2024. The project will be 89.8% funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) which has recently been funding several different quantum projects in Germany. For more details about the QSOLID project, you can view a press release available here.

March 10, 2022 - News Brief Fraunhofer IAF to Lead a €18.1 Million ($20M USD) “SPINNING” Project to Develop a Diamond Spin-photon Based Quantum Processor Made in Germany The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF will be leading a consortium of 28 organizations including, besides Fraunhofer, six universities, two non-profit research institutions, five industrial companies (SMEs and spin-offs), and fourteen associated partners (ten of them are companies). The project will be 89.8% funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). It will last for three years and will initially target 10 qubits with an expansion to 100 qubits or more as the project continues. The technology will employ spin qubits in synthetic diamond created by implanting nitrogen atoms (NV centers) in a diamond lattice. The expected benefits of this approach include high qubit connectivities with low cooling requirements. To learn more about the SPINNING project, you can view a press release issued by Fraunhofer announcing the program, another press release issued by Quantum Brilliance, one of the consortium partners, and a web page with a project profile of the SPINNING project.

March 10, 2022 QuantWare Releases an Off-the-Shelf 25 Qubit Superconducting Processor Chip For those who want to build their own superconducting quantum computer, Dutch startup Quantware is now offering an off-the-shelf 25 qubits superconducting processor chip with a 30 day delivery time after receipt of order. Contralto is a follow-on to a previous 5 qubit product called Soprano which the company indicates has been installed in labs on four different continents. To be sure, a superconducting chip is not the same as a full quantum computer. Users will need to add a classical computer, control electronics, dilution refrigerator, cabling systems, and mechanical packaging. But all of those pieces are available from other vendors so a user can construct their own quantum machine from all the components. For additional information about Quantware's announcement of this chip, click here.

March 10, 2022 - News Brief Rigetti Computing Reports FY 2021 Results Rigetti Computing reported fiscal year 2021 revenues of $8.2 million compared to $5.5 million in fiscal year 2020, a 48% rate of growth. The direct comparison gets a little complicated because Rigetti changed its fiscal calendar to conclude on December 31. So, the report for FY 2021 represented an 11 month year ending on December 31, 2021 while FY 2020 represented a full 12 month year that ended on January 31, 2021. The adjust EBITDA came in at a loss of $27.4 million which was about the same level as FY 2020. The company held $11.7 million in cash as of December 31, 2021 and announced that they received net proceeds of approximately $205.0 million as a result of their recent business combination with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company II, Ltd. A press release with additional financial details and a summary of recent technical, business, and operational developments can be accessed here.

March 10, 2022 - News Brief Ki3 Photonics and Quantum Bridge Technologies Receive $450,000 Grant from the U.S. Air Force to Study Large Quantum States for Quantum Photonics Infrastructures The two Canadian companies, Ki3 Photonics and Quantum Bridge Technologies, received the grant from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) to develop and methodologically study new techniques for the generation of large cluster states. A goal of this project will include finding ways of reducing resource requirements for the generation of cluster states when using various sources, identify the advantages and limitations of different approaches, and identify avenues to robust entanglement distribution in realistic environments. generation, control, and distribution of entangled particles is a key element in both quantum computing and quantum communications. So, a better understanding of how large cluster states can be created and manipulated can help enable applications like scalable measurement-based quantum computers, quantum repeaters, or even large networks of sensors based on quantum phenomena. Additional information is available in a news release on the Ki3 website here.

March 10, 2022 - News Brief Alice & Bob Raise €27 Million ($29.7M USD) in Series A Funding The funding was led by Elaia, BpiFrance Digital Venture Fund and Supernova Invest with additional participation from Breega. Alice & Bob is a quantum startup located in Paris, France that is developing a fault tolerant quantum computer based upon a superconducting cat qubit approach. They have also announced that their technology has reduced the prevalence of bit-flip errors by a factor of tens of thousands. They indicated that their technology has increased the time between bit-flips from a few milliseconds to 2 minutes. This could be a major advantage for implementing error correction code in the Alice & Bob processors because those codes would only need to correct for phase flips instead of needing to correct both bit-flips and phase-flips that would be required for other machines. This could drastically reduce the number of physical qubits needed to create a logical error corrected qubit. The company currently has a team of 40 and is planning to deliver its first commercial product in 2023. Additional information about the funding is available in a press release that can be accessed here. And additional information about improvements in bit-flip times can be found in a blog entree available here.

March 9, 2022 Pasqal and ARAMCO to Develop QC Apps Targeting Energy Industry Pasqal and ARAMCO just penned a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaboratively develop quantum computing use cases specific to the energy sector. Under the agreement, Pasqal will provide its experience and neutral-atom approach that delivers 100+ qubit scalability and its platform’s flexibility that includes changing the geometry of a quantum register at each run to adapt to a specific challenge. Pasqal’s proprietary algorithms including Quantum Evolution Kernel (QEK) and others will be used for a variety of applications throughout the endeavor. The initial focus will be on creating quantum machine learning (QML) models. Click here for more.

March 8, 2022 Q-CTRL Shows Significant Improvements in Quantum Algorithmic Success with Its Quantum Control Software Q-CTRL has announced they have achieved significant improvements in quantum algorithm success with the quantum processor benchmarking suite released last year by the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) in testing that used its Boulder Opal software. The amount of the benefits could vary significantly depending upon the specific algorithm and processor used, but Q-CTRL did report achieving improvements in success probability of up to 9000X in a test that used the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm with IBM’s 16 qubit Guadalupe machine. Although other tests using different benchmarks or other processors showed lower levels of improvements, Q-CTRL’s testing showed a consistent pattern of improvement over multiple runs on different days, different algorithms, and different processors. Click here to read more about the improvements that were seen in this testing.

March 7, 2022 - News Brief Amazon Braket is Now Supporting OpenQASM Programs Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it is now supporting the OpenQASM quantum assembly on all the gate-based quantum processors currently in the Amazon Braket Service. These include the processors from IonQ, Oxford Quantum Circuits, and Rigetti. However, this would not include the D-Wave quantum annealer since that is not a gate-based processor. OpenQASM is also supported by IBM. So, users will have the ability to write a single program and run it on different machines to compare the results. The compatibility is achieved using backend compilers for each of the machines that will automatically translate the OpenQASM programs to the native gate set available in the target machine. This announcement is not too surprising to us since we previously wrote last September that a Technical Steering Committee had been set up to guide OpenQASM development and the initial members included IBM, AWS, Microsoft, and the University of Innsbruck. A blog article from AWS announcing this support can be found here.

March 7, 2022 Xanadu Will Collaborate with Global Foundries to Build Xanadu’s Photonic Quantum Processor Chips Xanadu has announced it will use Global Foundries’ GF Fotonix™ advanced 300mm silicon photonic for volume manufacturing of its next generation photonic processor that will include error correction and fault tolerance. The GF Fotonix™ process combines both photonics features and 300GHz-class RF-CMOS on a silicon wafer. Xanadu is currently undertaking the design of this chip with a goal of having a Global Foundries manufactured chip ready by the end of 2023. Click here for more.

March 6, 2022 Who’s News: Management Changes at Rigetti, IQM, QC Ware, Equal1 and Multiverse Computing As the quantum industry continues to expand, new talent is continuing to join the industry to fill key management roles. Click here to see the recent management additions announced at Rigetti, IQM, QC Ware, Equal1 and Multiverse Computing.

March 4, 2022 Quantum Algorithms Institute to Partner with Xanadu to Expand the Quantum Workforce in Canada The Quantum Algorithms Institute (QAI) is a non-profit organization in British Columbia which facilitates collaboration between industry, government, and academia to expand British Columbia’s applied quantum computing sector. They will be working with Xanadu to help students build expertise in quantum computing. They will be leveraging Xanadu’s Pennylane software to learn how to code quantum computing algorithms. As part of this activity, students will have the opportunity to work on real-world problems with QAI’s other industry and government partners in British Columbia. A news release announcing the collaboration between these two Canadian companies is available here.

March 3, 2022 Quix Quantum Introduces a New 20 Qumode Photonic Quantum Processor Quix Quantum, a quantum technology firm located in Enschede, the Netherlands, and a spinout of the University of Twente, has updated its processor lineup. Its new 20 qumode processor is both higher in capacity and also better in quality than their previous generation 12 qumode processor. Qumodes are often used in quantum photonic processors instead of qubits. Qumodes are different from qubits because they are continuously variable and, in theory, a qumode can be at least as powerful, or perhaps, even more powerful than a qubit. Click here for more details about this new photonic quantum processor.

March 2, 2022 - News Brief TuringQ Receives Its Third Round of Funding Shanghai based TuringQ has received its third venture capital round in what they call a Pre-A+ financing. This is the third funding round the company has received since it was founded in February 2021. Although the funding amount of this round wasn’t disclosed the company did indicate they have received a total of 500 million yuan ($79 million USD) over the three rounds. The lead investor in this latest round was Oriza Holdings with additional participation from Wuxi Binhu State-owned Capital Investment Company, Legend Capital, and Ambrum Capital. The company is working to be a full-stack quantum computing company with a photonic based quantum processor using chips built in a 3D architecture. Their system will include including quantum light sources, optical quantum information processing chips, detection systems, dedicated optical quantum computing software, optical quantum chips EDA software cloud access, and an optical quantum computing operating system (TuringQ OS). The company will be using the funds to recruit additional R&D personnel to continue the development of their technology. Additional information about this funding is available in an article post at PanDaily which you can find here.

March 2, 2022 Rigetti Computing is Now a Public Company after Closing the Business Combination with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company II, Ltd. As we reported last October, Rigetti Computing is now a public company and its shares are trading on the NASDAQ exchange under ticker symbol RGTI. Associated with the close, the company has received $261.75 million in cash of which $114.24 million came from a trust account held by Supernova before the merger and an additional $147.51 million from a fully committed PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity). Click here for the full article.

March 1, 2022 IBM Introduces IBM Quantum Prototypes for Users to Try Out New Cutting Edge Quantum Algorithms IBM has created a new capability called IBM Quantum prototypes that allows users to beta test new quantum algorithms being developed by IBM Research that aren’t ready yet to be integrated into a Qiskit library release. This capability provides a user with early access to the algorithms but can also help IBM gather early feedback on the new algorithms. IBM has released two algorithms to IBM Quantum prototypes called Entanglement Forging and Quantum Kernel Training. Click here to learn more about IBM Quantum prototypes and the two algorithms that have been released into it.

February 28, 2022 - News Brief Oxford Quantum Circuits’ 8-Qubit “Lucy” Computer is Now Available on Amazon Braket Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) Lucy computer is an 8-qubit machine based upon superconducting technology. It is based upon OQC’s patented Coaxmon technology which is a three-dimensional architecture which puts some of the key componentry off-chip which they contend will make it much more scalable. The machine will be available 15 hours per week from 10 AM to 1 PM GMT, Monday through Friday. The Lucy machine is physically located in the UK and will be accessible through Amazon Braket’s London region (eu-west-2) service. The OQC machine will be the first Amazon Braket machine located outside the United States and brings some additional benefits to European users such as lower data latency times and an ability to comply with certain country’s data residency requirements. Amazon had previously announced at their re:Invent conference last November that they will be adding hardware from OQC and QuEra to their Braket service in 2022. Additional information is available in a news release from OQC that can be found here, a blog post from AWS that is available here, an OQC webpage on the AWS site here, and another web page titled “OQC on AWS” located on the OQC website here.

February 27, 2022 - News Brief Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI) and QPhoton Enter into a Multifaceted Partnership Quantum Computing Inc., a Virginia based quantum software company specializing in developing optimization software for use with quantum computers, and QPhoton, a New Jersey based quantum photonics company developing products for use in biomedics, remote sensing, cyber security, and AI applications, have announced agreements that include an exclusive marketing agreement for the companies to jointly sell and market quantum and phonic products developed by the partners, a loan of up to $2.5 million from QCI to QPhoton, and an exclusivity agreement to allow QCI to negotiate exclusively for a limited time with QPhoton for a potential sale of QPhoton or its assets (or similar transaction). The companies are working to demonstrate a solution that companies QCI’s quantum optimization software technology with QPhoton’s quantum and photonic computing technologies by Q4 2022. Additional details about all of these elements of their partnership can be found in a press release provided by QCI here as well as QCI SEC filings that can be accessed here and here.

February 25, 2022 Super.tech Receives a $1.65 Million SBIR Award and QuantrolOx Raises £1.4 Million ($1.88M USD) in Seed Funding Two quantum software companies have received funding this week, but in different ways. Super.tech has won an SBIR Phase 2 award from the U.S. Department of Energy for further development of their software. And UK company QuantrolOx closed seed funding for further development of their machine learning software to automatically tune, calibrate, stabilize and optimize qubits. Click here for the full article.

February 25, 2022 - News Brief Quside Introduces a New Quantum Random Number Generator Chip The chip, called the QN 100, can generate random bits at a fast rate of 1 gigabits per second (Gbps). It works by measuring the quantum random phase in light pulses. It can be used to generate secure cryptographic keys or other applications where fully random numbers are required. The company is a spinoff of The Institute of Photonic Science (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain and they are working with a pure-play semiconductor foundry to have the chip fabricated in a reliable and repeatable manner typical of semiconductors. Additional information about this chip is available in a news release located on their website here and also a product page which describes the QN 100 in more detail here.

February 24, 2022 - News Brief The Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Has Open Sourced a Quantum Control Electronics Design The design is meant to supply all the room temperature control electronics to control the qubits in a superconducting based quantum computer. It is called QubiC and includes FPGAs, Analog to Digital Converters (ADC), Digital to Analog Converters (DAC) and other logic to generate the necessary control pulse to operate a superconducting qubit as well as perform the readout measurement to determine a qubit’s state. The design is customizable and modular and can be adapted to different user’s configurations. Although there are many commercial companies offering control electronic systems for controlling qubits, none of them are open sourced. AQT is hoping that an open-sourced design can be leveraged by the broader quantum information science community to access and improve the design in a way that is similar to what occurs frequently with open-sourced software. Additional information about this design can be found in a blog posted on Phys.org here, a more detailed technical paper posted on IEEE Xplore here, and the open-sourced design files posted on GitHub here.

February 24, 2022 - News Brief Quantum Machines Announces General Availability of Its Pulse Processing Unit (PPU) for Real Time Qubit Control The Quantum Machines Pulse Processing Unit (PPU), codenamed Hadamard, consists of an FPGA based unit with 18 processor cores that includes multiple waveform generators, digitizers, and processing units. It works with the rest of the OPX+ which includes analog to digital and digital to analog converters as well as a communications backplane which will provide all the needed control interfaces to the qubits. A key feature of the PPU is that it includes flexible, real-time control capabilities to support such things as error correction, mid-circuit measurements and If/Else and Case statements for conditional execution in real time. These capabilities allow the unit to alter the operation during the execution based upon conditions inside the circuit. Many other control implementations do not currently have this capability and will just provide a series of control pulses that were pre-planned ahead of time. Quantum Machines indicated that this capability has been able to speed up circuit execution by up to 5000 times in some situations. The PPU can be programmed with QUA, Quantum Machines Python-based quantum pulse-level programming language. For more, you can access Quantum Machines announcement about the general availability of this new Pulse Processing Unit here.

February 24, 2022 New Quantum Partnerships Form Between Zapata/Andretti Motorsports and Strangeworks/Quantum Algorithms Institute Companies are leveraging advances in technology via collaboration to expedite use cases and to build quantum infrastructure. Click here for two recent examples of how Zapata and Andretti Motorsports and also Strangeworks and the Quantum Algorithms Institute are working together to advance the technology.

February 23, 2022 Two New Quantum Benchmarking Suites Announced by IonQ and Super.Tech IonQ and Super.Tech have disclosed their own quantum benchmarking suites called Algorithmic Qubits and SuperMarQ, respectively. Both benchmark suites are based upon running common quantum algorithms rather than randomized circuits. And the Boston Consulting Group published a white paper that companies some of the existing benchmarks and discusses how benchmarks can be a key source of competitive advantage for investors and end users. Click here to read details about all of these.

February 23, 2022 Deloitte Quantum Climate Challenge seeks to Optimize Climate Impacts of Air Travel Deloitte Consulting is sponsoring a Quantum Climate Challenge to address issues of climate change associated with air travel. The effects of air travel on localized and global climate are a complex calculation in which clouds caused by aircraft contrails can have a warming or a cooling effect on the climate. The best submissions will have the opportunity to present at the Deloitte Greenhouse in Berlin and be eligible to win part of the €12,000 prize pool. For more information about this quantum challenge, click here to read our article with additional information.

February 22, 2022 - News Brief Quantinuum and IBM Announce an Expansion of the IBM Quantum Hub at Cambridge Quantum and an Addition to IBM’s Financial Investment in Quantinuum In July of 2020, Cambridge Quantum Computing, now a part of Quantinuum, announced that they were the first startup company selected to be a hub in the IBM Q Network. The companies have now agreed to expand the IBM Quantum Hub capability at Cambridge Quantum to allow their clients greater access to IBM’s quantum computing systems including IBM’s recently announced 127 qubit processor. Even though the other part of Quantinuum, formerly Honeywell Quantum Solutions, has its own ion trap based quantum processor, this continues Cambridge Quantum’s strategy of offering support for a broad range of quantum processors including the superconducting based processors provided by IBM in order to support a variety of client needs. Similarly, IBM had announced in February 2020 that they would be making an equity investment in Cambridge Quantum. Now that Cambridge Quantum has been merged into Quantinuum, IBM’s stake has been transferred to the new company and the companies have now announced that IBM Ventures is adding to this previous investment. At this point, Quantinuum has three significant strategic shareholders in Honeywell, IBM and JSR Corp. You can view Quantinuum’s announcement of these two events in a press release available on their website here.

February 21, 2022 New Quantum Programming Languages Introduced by MIT and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) MIT and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have introduced new quantum programming languages that to provide specific features not available with some of the other programming platforms that are available. The MIT language is called Twist and is intended to help prorammers ensure the correctness of their quantum programs. The CAS language is called isQ-Core and has been developed to support the cloud-based quantum computer systems deployed by CAS. Click here for more.

February 20, 2022 Infineon Introduces Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Chip with Quantum Resistant Firmware Update Capability Infineon has introduced a news chips called Optiga TPM that includes firmware download capability using the quantum resistant XMSS digital signature algorithm. TPM chips are secure crypto-processors that is designed to carry out cryptographic operations and provide a root-of-trust for the rest of the system. This is the first commercial chip we are aware of that has this type of quantum resistant functionality built-in. Click here for our full articles on this.

February 19, 2022 - News Brief JPMorgan Chase, Toshiba, and Ciena Demonstrate a QKD Protected Blockchain Application A research team from JP Morgan Chase, Toshiba, and Ciena have demonstrated a quantum protected blockchain application over a 70 kilometer fiber optic cable. The demonstration was able to multiplex one QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) channel, two 800 gigabit/second channels (Gbps), and eight 100 gigabit/second channels over a single fiberoptic cable using DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) technology. The QKD channel was used to supply up to 258 AES-256 keys at a refresh rate of 1 key/second for the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm and the 800 Gbps and 100 Gbps channels were used to transmit the encrypted data using the AES keys supplied by the QKD channel. Additional tests were performed with an extended distance of 100 km, although the Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) increased significantly and the secret key rate decreased significantly at the longer distance. To learn more about this demonstration, you can view a news announcement provided by JP Morgan Chase here and view a technical paper which describes this experiment in much more detail here.

February 18, 2022 - News Brief Rigetti Demonstrates Two-Qubit Gate Fidelities as High as 99.5% on a Test Device One of the most important measures of qubit quality is the two-qubit gate fidelity. All the quantum hardware providers are working to improve this measure in their next generation devices. Without further improvements, it will be difficult for any company to run any NISQ algorithms that provide accurate answers or meet the required error rate threshold for error correction techniques to actually work. Rigetti Computing is also working on this and announced that they have achieved two-qubit gate fidelities on a 9 qubit test device as high as 99.5% with a median of 99.2%. This level would be competitive with some of the very best quantum processors that we track on our Qubit Quality page. For comparison, Rigetti’s has reported that their latest 80 qubit production machine, named Aspen-M-1, is providing two-qubit median fidelities between 92.7%-95.8% depending upon the particular gate type. The next step for Rigetti will be to incorporate the techniques and processes they have developed with this test chip into a future revision of a production device that can maintain this level of gate fidelity on a device that has many more qubits. Additional information is available in a news release provided by Rigetti available here.

February 18, 2022 - News Brief IonQ Partners with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to Create a Reliable Source of Barium for IonQ’s Quantum Computers IonQ had announced last December that its next generation quantum computers would use Barium ions for its qubits instead of the Ytterbium ions it has been using. At the time, they cited a number of reasons for doing so including lower error rates, higher gate fidelity, better state detection, better reliability, and easier to network for creating modular systems. However, the source for the Barium material may not be available off-the-shelf, particularly if there are requirements for very high purity or a specific Barium isotope. To ensure a reliable source, IonQ has partnered with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to ensure a sustainable domestic supply of the material. In addition, the team has been able to reduce the size of the Barium source material to microscopic scale which will be a benefit in IonQ’s efforts to miniaturize its systems. In related developments, IonQ has joined the Northwest Quantum Nexus (NQN), along with Microsoft, the University of Washington (UW) and PNNL and also announced that it plans to soon create a product engineering facility in the Seattle area. You can view IonQ’s announcement of its partnership with PNNL in a news release located here.

February 17, 2022 Israeli Government to Fund Quantum Computer Development with a Budget of 200 Million Israeli New Shekels ($62M USD) The project was announced by Israel’s Defense Ministry’s Directorate of Research and Development (MAFAT) and the Innovation Authority and will consist of two tracks. The first will be led by the Innovation Authority with a project to develop a quantum processor with about 20 qubits. The second track, led by MAFAT, will establish a national quantum capabilities center with support from the industry and academia. The agencies believe it is a national security issue to have this quantum independence capability, so they don’t get left behind or prevented from utilizing quantum technology due to another country’s export controls. To read our full article about this announcement, click here.

February 17, 2022 - News Brief Classiq Raises $33 Million in a Series B Round This round adds new investors including Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, the venture capital program of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE); Phoenix, a $60-billion insurance company; Spike Ventures, a Stanford alumni investor group; and Samsung NEXT, the investment and personal investments from Lip-Bu Tan and Harvey Jones. It also includes existing investors Wing VC, Team8, Entrée Capital, Sumitomo Corp. (through IN Venture) and O,urCrowd. This brings the total funding for the company to $48 million since it was founded in early 2020. Classiq provides quantum programming software that automatically transforms high-level functional models into optimized quantum circuits for a wide range of hardware and cloud providers. The addition of Lip-Bu Tan and Harvey Jones to their investor base is particularly significant because Tan is the executive chairman of Cadence Design Systems and Jones is the former president and CEO of Synopsys. Both gentlemen are intimately familiar with the challenges in providing high level electronic design software for classical computing integrated circuits and should be able to share valuable insights for similar issues that are sure to come up with quantum computing circuits. Classiq will use the funds to quadruple the company’s headcount by adding both engineering and sales support personnel. They are planning to expand their office in the U.S. and open new offices in Europe and Japan for sales and support. The bulk of their engineering activities will remain in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information about this funding round, you can view Classiq’s press announcement available here.

February 16, 2022 - News Brief Atom Computing, ColdQuanta, Meadowlark Optics, and SPIE Join the University of Colorado Boulder’s CUbit Quantum Initiative These four companies will be the first four strategic industry partners who are joining this program. The CUbit Quantum Initiative is an interdisciplinary hub of organizations in Colorado that work in quantum information science and technology. The initiative partners with regional universities and laboratories, quantum related companies, and serves a spectrum of local, regional and national interests. Key activities of CUbit are to perform joint research in areas of common interest and also to collaborate on workforce development programs, and provide real-world opportunities for CU Boulder students and researchers. Colorado is striving to become a key hub in quantum technology and already has several prominent quantum organizations from industry, academia, and government labs located in the state. Additional information about the CUbit Quantum Initiative and its new industry partners can be found in a new release located here and also a blog post from Atom Computing here.

February 16, 2022 Rigetti and Ampere Partner to Develop Cloud-native Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computers Rigetti is partnering with Ampere, a manufacturer of very high performance classical microprocessors to develop high-performance hybrid quantum-classical computers for use in cloud installations. They will also work together to optimize Rigetti's quantum simulation software for best performance on Ampere's microprocessors. Click here for the full article.

February 15, 2022 Rigetti Announces Commercial Availability of their 80 Qubit Aspen-M and a Teaming with NASDAQ to Explore Financial Applications of QC Rigetti has taken the next step with their 80 qubit Aspen-M-1 processor by making it commercial available on both Rigetti’s Quantum Cloud Service (QCS) and also on the Amazon Braket service. Previously, this machine was only available for private beta testing through QCS. In another announcement, Rigetti announced that they have reached a collaborative agreement with Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) to explore quantum applications to help solve high-impact computational problems in the financial industry. Click here for the full article that describes both announcements in more detail.

February 14, 2022 - News Brief University of Strathclyde Will Lead Two Quantum Programs with a Total Budget of £960,000 ($1.3M USD) The first program is an International Network in Space Quantum Technologies which will include a consortium of 37 members in 13 countries, including four industrial partners, to develop satellite-enabled quantum-secure communication and Earth observation. It will tackle the technical challenges of putting quantum technology into space including the radiation environment in space, autonomous and remote operation and the limited size, weight and power constraints of satellites. This program will be funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) with a budget of £480,000. The second program is an International Network for Microfabrication of Atomic Quantum Sensors. This program will develop the next generation of miniaturized quantum sensors, with potential applications in healthcare, navigation, finance, communication and security. It is also funded by UKRI with a budget of £480,000. Additional information about these two quantum related awards is available in a news release on the University of Strathclyde website here.

February 12, 2022 - News Brief Quantum Motion Opens a New Lab in London Quantum Motion, a quantum hardware company spun out by academics from University College London (UCL) and Oxford University, has opened up a new development lab in the Islington section of London. The lab will employ 25 full time staff including quantum theorists, physicists and integrated circuit (IC) engineers. Quantum Motion is developing a quantum processor using silicon-based spin qubits and has received almost £20 million ($27M USD) in equity and grant funding. Additional information about Quantum Motion and this new lab is available in a post on the UCL website here and another brief post on the Quantum MRotion website here.

February 12, 2022 Quantum South Releases Air Cargo Optimization Application Quantum South, a software development company based in Uruguay, has announced the release of software to optimize logistics and arrangement of air cargo for transport. The software utilizes the power of quantum computing to handle multiple variable optimization problems, as loading companies must take into account load shape, weight, and center of gravity as well as important plane and flight characteristics such as shear and fuselage shape. Click here for the rest of the article.

February 12, 2022 Who’s News: Management Updates at Rigetti, Cambridge Quantum, and QuintessenceLabs Rigetti Computing, Cambridge Quantum and QuintessenceLabs have all recent announced new additions to their management team. Click here to find out who has joined each of these organizations.

February 10, 2022 Duke University and IonQ Develop New Types of N-Qubit Gates Duke University and IonQ have developed is a way to implement various types of N-Qubit gates, including the Toffoli gate, natively in one level. Using these gates can potentially simplify and speed up the function while simultaneously offering a reduced error versus the synthesizing the N-Qubit gates from single and 2-qubit gates. And this approach is not just limited to three qubits. It can potentially be used on all the qubits in the ion trap chain. It can potentially be a significant benefit to programmers, depending upon the particular algorithm they are implementing. Click here for the full article.

February 10, 2022 - News Brief Rigetti and Zapata Partner to Integrate Zapata’s Software Into Rigetti’s Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) Although Zapata Computing has been supporting Rigetti’s processors for a long time, this new development will represent a tighter integration that will provide additional improvements. Many of the quantum programs being run today are hybrid classical/quantum programs that require usage of both types of resources to arrive at a result. Because of this, the efficiency of the interface between the classical and quantum resources becomes very important and can have a big impact on the overall runtime for a particular program. The new development will integrate Orquestra, Zapata’s unified platform for building and deploying quantum applications, directly with Rigetti’s Quantum Cloud Services (QCS). In order to run a particular hybrid program, the classical and quantum processor may need to exchange data thousands of times and this integration will improve the speed of those exchanges and reduce overall latency for the end users. In addition, this improvement in latency may have an interesting side effect in improving solution quality because the qubit calibrations in a quantum processor tend to drift over time which can start causing more errors. By shortening the runtime of a program, the amount of drift is also minimized. Integrating the software will also provide other advantages by enabling the optimization and automation of the compiler toolchain for error mitigation purposes. This integrated compiler toolchain functionality is expected to be available to customers in Q2 2022. For more information, you can access the announcement of this partnership posted on the Zapata website here.

February 9, 2022 - News Brief Nord Quantique Receives $9.5 Million CAD ($7.5M USD) in Seed Funding The funding was led by BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fund and Paris-based Quantonation VC fund. Previous investor Real Ventures also participated in this round. Nord Quantique is developing a superconducting quantum processor that will use bosonic codes to provide error mitigated qubits. They believe that their approach will result in lower error qubits than other superconducting qubit implementations. Nord Quantique, founded in 2020, is located in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada and is a partner of the Sherbrooke Quantum Innovation Zone. Additional information can be found in a news release posted on the Nord Quantique website here.

February 9, 2022 Germany Expands its Quantum Computing Roadmap with QuaST Germany aims to become a leader in quantum technologies and is rapidly rolling out its roadmap. A newly launched Quantum-enabling Services and Tools for Industrial Applications (QuaST) Consortium will enable rapid quantum adoption without requiring relevant prior knowledge or major investment. QuaST will supply end-users with high-level libraries that automatically decompose a solution into parts requiring classical, high-performance or quantum computing, according to the problem submitted. The parts requiring quantum computing are then optimized and mapped onto the hardware, including a co-design process. Potential applications include logistic optimization, scheduling in production management, health care and drug development and cases from automotive and cybersecurity. Click here for more.

February 8, 2022 D-Wave Will Go Public with a SPAC Transaction and an Estimated Market Cap of $1.6 Billion D-Wave will merge with DPCM Capital, a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC), in a transaction that will have a pro-forma implied market capitalization of the combined company of about $1.6 billion USD. The pre-money valuation of D-Wave will be $1.2 billion. The transaction is similar to those that have been announced with IonQ and Rigetti, but it does include a few twists. Like the other transactions, D-Wave will receive an infusion of cash of about $340 million. This will come from the $300 million of cash in DPCM existing trust with an additional $40 million in a PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) transaction from a group of strategic and institutional investors. Click here to view the rest of the article.

February 7, 2022 - News Brief Zapata Computing and Qureca Announce an Online QC Training Course The two companies are partnering to offer a self-pace online course called Quantum Training for Enterprises that will cover quantum computing basics, challenges and potential impact in the near term. The course is configured as a modular course taught by Zapata executives, scientists and engineering experts which can be completed in about 3 weeks with a time commitment of about 2 hours each week. Altogether there are eight modules including a Getting Started and Wrap-up module. Completion certificates are provided for those who pass all the quizzes at the end of each lesson. For those who are already clients of Zapata, the course is available at no extra charge. The course is also available for those who are not Zapata clients at a price of £1,000 ($1353 USD) by registering directly on the Qureca website. A news release announcing this training course is available on the Zapata website here and a more detailed description of the course can be found on the Qureca website here.

February 6, 2022 - News Brief Polaris Quantum Biotech and Allosteric Bioscience Partner to Research Use of Quantum for Improving Aging and Longevity Polaris Quantum Biotech (Polarisqb) is a quantum software company that uses quantum computing and artificial intelligence to process, evaluate and identify drug lead molecules 10,000 times faster than alternative solutions. Allosteric Bioscience is a company formed in 2021 to utilize quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and other sciences to create improved treatments for aging, longevity, and aging related diseases. The goal of the partnership will be to leverage their respective technologies to create an inhibitor of a key protein involved in human aging and longevity. Polarisqb will be using its Tachyontm drug design platform and Allosteric Bioscience will be using its two aging platforms: “ALT” – Aging Longevity Targets and “ALM” – Aging Longevity Modulators for this research. As part of the agreement Allosteric Bioscience will also be making an equity investment in Polarisqb. For more information about this partnership, you can view a news release available here.

February 5, 2022 - News Brief Quebec-IBM Discovery Accelerator Launched and Will Receive an IBM System Quantum Processor in 2023 In a partnership between the Government of Quebec and IBM, they will set up the Quebec-IBM Discovery Accelerator to develop new projects, collaborations, and build skills, and investigate solutions to problems in critical areas of research such as energy, life sciences, and sustainability. The Discovery Accelerator will be working to research advanced in other advanced computing technologies including AI and High Performance Classical Computing (HPC), in addition to its activities in quantum computing. As part of this effort IBM will install a model of its IBM Q System One quantum processor in early 2023 at one of its facilities Bromont, Quebec alongside a new high-performance classical computing cluster for AI. This will be the fifth processor that IBM will be installing outside of its base in New York state and will follow other installations that have occurred or are being planned in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic. IBM has issued both a press release and a blog that provides additional information related to this announcement, and you can view them here and here.

February 5, 2022 - News Brief Microsoft Offering Free Credits to Try Out Azure Quantum Microsoft has initiated a program to provide $500 of free credits for use of Azure Quantum for each of its partners. The systems currently available are IonQ’s QPU (as well as their free Simulator) and Quantinuum’s H1 QPU and Emulator and soon they will be adding superconducting systems from Rigetti and Quantum Circuits Inc. (QCI). There are no applications requirements or approvals needed and the potential total of credits could add up to $2,000 if you use all four providers. For researchers who use up the $500 credits and would like to apply for more, you can submit an Azure Quantum Credits application and see if Microsoft will approve additional credits. Credit allocation for that program will be determined based on the potential value for the quantum ecosystem either from research, educational, or commercial point of view. Additional information about Microsoft’s free Azure Quantum credit program can be found in a blog post located on the MIcrosoft website here.

February 4, 2022 - News Brief Algorithmiq Raises a $4 Million Seed Round Algorithmiq is a company located in Helsinki, Finland that is developing advanced algorithms to solve complex problems in life sciences. They have raised this seed round from investors including Jorma Ollila (Nokia/Shell), Haakon Overli (Dawn Capital), Thames Trust (Lord Jim O’Neill), David Helgason (Foobar/Unity3D), Tiger Global Management, Feroz Dewan (Arena Holdings), Keenan Rice (Tokyo Black/ LookerGoogle/Firebolt) and K5 Global, and other European and US angels and entrepreneurs. The funds will be used to make their novel quantum-enhanced drug discovery platform commercially available. Algorithmiq’s announcement of this funding can be seen in a LinkedIn post available here.

February 4, 2022 German Government Funds €16 Million ($18.3M USD) for Photonic Quantum Computer Development The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is providing this funding to a project called PhotonQ which will be led by the University of Stuttgart and include the Universities of Würzburg, Mainz and Ulm, the Technical University of Munich, the Institute of Microelectronics Stuttgart and Vanguard Automation GmbH. The goal of the four-year project will be to demonstrate a quantum computer with eight qubits that will use a technique called measurement-based quantum computing. To accomplish this the team will be developing deterministic photon sources, scalable silicon photonics circuits, better connection technology and novel single-photon detectors. Key considerations for this project will be to reduce the optical losses in the system as much as possible while increasing the efficiency of the devices that generate and detect the photons. A news release about this project provided by the University of Stuttgart (in German) is available here.

February 3, 2022 InfinityQ Receives Additional Financing to Commercialize Quantum Analog Quantum analog creator infinityQ Technology closed a seed-extension round of financing with new investors Hevella Capital, iGlobe Partners and Westcott Investment Group, and participation from existing partners Cato Stonex and Louis Vachon, bringing the total raised to date to nearly $5 million USD. Click here for the full article.

February 2, 2022 - News Brief ColdQuanta Releases Summary of Achievements in 2021 ColdQuanta has issued a press release that describes its progress in 2021. Key metrics include a 140% growth in bookings and a 70% growth in headcount. In addition, their progress occurred on many fronts including new customers contracts, new members of their leadership team, new partnerships, and new technical milestones. Many of these milestones had previously been reported last year in the Quantum Computing Report. You can view ColdQuanta’s news release summarizing many of the key developments at the company in 2021 here.

February 2, 2022 - News Brief Multiverse Partners Will Use Xanadu’s PennyLane Software as a Core Element for Its Software Multiverse Computing has announced a partnership with Xanadu to utilize PennyLane software as a core element for much of its software. PennyLane is a hardware agnostic, open source quantum software platform that provides a dedicated library for quantum machine learning. Use of this software will improve the speed and make it easier for Multiverse and its financial industry clients to develop applications. Although PennyLane will be utilized for many of Multiverse’s products, they do have some others that work with D-Wave’s quantum annealer and Tensor Networks. The PennyLane library won’t be in use for these right now because PennyLane doesn’t interface with these platforms yet. You can view a news release provided by Multiverse announcing this partnership on their website here.

February 1, 2022 U.S. Government Releases a National Strategic Plan for Quantum Workforce Development Along with Several Other Workforce Development Activities The U.S. government's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee on Quantum Information Science (SCQIS), the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)’s National Quantum Coordination Office (NQCO), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have released a strategic plan and a new solicitation and several programs to help develop a robust quantum trained workforce in the United States. Click here for a summary of their recently announced activities.

January 29, 2022 - News Brief Strangeworks and Entangled Networks Partner to Provide Solutions for Multi-QPU Configurations One of the techniques being explored by many quantum hardware providers to increase the number of usable qubits is to create a cluster of multiple quantum processor units (QPUs) and network them together in a mini quantum internet. This strategy follows a similar pattern that was pioneered in classical computing over 30 years ago. However, developing software that takes advantage of this type of configuration can be a challenging problem, but Entangled Networks is working on both hardware and software solutions to make this happen. They have just announced their first product called MultiQopt which is a multi-QPU compiler that provides best-in-class quantum circuit optimization for modular system architectures. To bring this to market, they have partnered with Strangeworks make the product available in a future Backstage Pass ticket on the Strangeworks platform. One of the first hardware platform where this software will be used is with Rigetti’s 80-qubit design which consists of two 40-qubit chips and is also supported by Strangeworks. But several other hardware companies are planning to have their own multi-QPU systems available in the future too. You can view the press release issued by both companies announcing the MultiQopt sofware and their partnership here.

January 29, 2022 - News Brief Agnostiq Releases Covalent, an Open Source Workflow Orchestration Platform Agnostiq, a Toronto based quantum software company, has released Covalent, a workflow orchestration platform which is designed to make it easier for users to utilize the capabilities of quantum processors as well as classical high performance computing hardware. It will break workflows down into modular Python components to allow users to easily reproduce repetitive code and avoid costly reruns and it includes an intelligent task scheduler that automatically selects the best hardware resource for a given task based on a mix of predefined as well as user-defined constraints. Because the software is open source, a user can more easily integrate a variety of classical and quantum hardware backends into the software. For more about Covalent, you can view a news release released by Agnostic here and also a webpage for the software located on the Agnostiq website here.

January 28, 2022 - News Brief Menten AI Chooses Xanadu’s Pennylane to Help Design Novel Drug Molecules Menten AI is a biotech startup that is developing a software platform for protein design using next-generation technology that leverages machine learning and quantum computing. They have decided to use Xanadu’s open-source PennyLane library as the base for its quantum machine learning solutions. Pennylane is a dedicated library for quantum machine learning that integrates many different simulators and quantum hardware platforms. It is a good fit for Menten’s development approach of utilizing machine learning and quantum computing for drug design. Since both companies are located in Toronto, Canada, it may also make it a little easier for the two companies to work together. Additional information is available in a news release provided by Menten AI which is available here.

January 27, 2022 - News Brief USRA-Rigetti-NASA Start Work on DARPA ONISQ Phase 2 In March of 2020, we reported on an award from the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)to a team from the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), Rigetti Computing and NASA for work on a program called ONISQ (Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices). The goal of ONISQ is to research how NISQ level quantum computers can be used to provide an advantage in solving optimization problems. This activity has been quite productive as there has already been more than ten scientific papers, published or presented at international conferences or currently under review. The team has now advanced work to start on Phase 2 of this program which entails testing applications of increasing scale and benchmarking the solutions against high-performance classical computers to see if the quantum approach can provide an advantage. The Phase 2 work will include the use of Rigetti’s recently announced 80 qubit processor. More about the Phase 2 activity of this ONISQ program is available in a news release provided by Rigetti which you can see here and another news release from USRA which is available here.

January 26, 2022 - News Brief PQShield Raises $20 Million Series A Funding The funding round was led by Addition, with participation from existing investors Oxford Science Enterprises (formerly OSI) and Crane. PQShield is headquartered in Oxford, UK and specializes in providing solutions for Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC). Their products include a post-quantum System-on-a-Chip (SOC) crypto co-processor design, a cryptographic SDK for mobile and server technologies, and a toolkit for messaging platforms and apps to ensure the privacy and long-lasting confidentiality of sensitive data. The company has been participating in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization process and they are the authors of several of the NIST PQC finalist algorithms. The company currently has employees in the UK, United States, France and the Netherlands and will be using the funds to double the size of their staff by the end of the year. Their announcement of the funding with additional information is available in a news release that can be seen here.

January 25, 2022 - News Brief HQS Quantum Simulations Receives a €12 Million ($13.58M USD) Series A Venture Capital Round The round was led by Quantonation with additional participation from previous investors UVC Partners, btov Industrial Technologies and High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF). HQS Quantum Simulations develops quantum algorithms to predict molecular properties for performance materials, specialty chemicals and pharmaceutical companies. In addition, they have developed software that can initially be run on classical computers but can be transferred to quantum computers once more powerful quantum computers are available. They are part of the Q-Exa consortium which aims to install in the first quantum computer manufactured in Germany at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre by the end of this year. They will use the funds to enhance its HQS Quantum Assisted Design cloud platform while expanding its open-source library, called Active Space Finder. More information about HQS and this new funding can be found in a news release located on the HQS website here.

January 25, 2022 Classiq and ColdQuanta Partnership Aimed at Providing Solutions for 100+ Qubit Systems The companies state that this type of partnership is very important for end users to take advantage of machines that have more than a few dozen qubits. Although smaller machines can be programmed manually with lower-level languages at the individual gate level, once the processors hit the 100 qubit and higher level this becomes too complex to do it efficiently. For more about this new partnership, you can read the rest of our article describing it here.

January 24, 2022 Who’s News: Management Updates at SEEQC, Riverlane, Arqit, and Multiverse Computing SEEQC has created a new Scientific Advisory Board and appointed a new Vice-President of Engineering. Riverlane has recruited a new Head of Engineering to guide their efforts in fault tolerant quantum computing. Arqit has added a new advisor. And Multiverse has brought on a CEO for its new French subsidiary. Click here to read our full article reporting on these changes.

January 23, 2022 - News Brief Virginia Tech to Establish a Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering The new center was announced by Virginia Tech President Tim Sands and will be located on their campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It will complement another Center of Quantum Architecture and Software Development on the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus located in Alexandria, Virginia. The center will unite quantum research across disciplines and will initially include sixteen Virginia Tech faculty providing multidisciplinary expertise in physics, mathematics, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and material science. Some of the goals of the new center will be to strengthen Virginia Tech proposals for large center-scale grants and raise the visibility of this work, facilitate new partnerships, and attract faculty and students for work at the forefront of quantum research. More about Virginia Tech’s announcement about the creation of the center can be found in a news release here. You can also view a webpage for the center itself here.

January 22, 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF) Issues “Quantum Computing Governance Principles” Report The World Economic Forum’s Quantum Computing Governance project seeks to encourage the development of responsible quantum computing. Although quantum technology is still very new and in early development, they believe that this early stage is the best time to discuss the ethical, legal and societal impacts of quantum computing. This report lays out the first set of principles for responsible design and adoption of quantum computing technologies in order to incentivize the development of the technology while minimizing the possible risks. Click here for more.

January 21, 2022 Quantum Computing Inc. Announces a New QCI Qonsulting Practice and Signs Up Its First Customer Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI), a quantum software company that provides its hardware agnostic Qatalyst quantum optimization software, has established a new consulting practice to help customers through their quantum journey. The company has developed a four-phase framework that they call Path2Quantum (P2Q) that can help clients define quantum opportunities, define appropriate quantum infrastructures, measure quantum potential, and achieve first quantum production results that will help enterprises plan their quantum computing adoption. Associated with the launch of their QCI Qonsulting practice, they also announced their first client, an employee staffing solutions company called Quad M Solutions, Inc. (Quad M). The companies will work together to improve the efficiency of the company’s self-underwritten medical insurance. For more about these announcements, click here to read our full article.

January 20, 2022 - News Brief Quantum Brilliance, Fraunhofer Institute, and University of Ulm Will Collaborate in a €19.9 Million ($22.5M USD) Project to Research Diamond-Based Quantum Microprocessors The project will be 74.8 percent funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with the remaining budget covered by the consortium partners and it is expected to run through November 30, 2024. Key activities will be to develop growth processes for diamond substrates of high purity and quality as well as develop precision manufacturing techniques for fabricating scalable arrays of diamond (also known as NV center) qubits. Other important activities will be to develop mechanisms for the selective initialization, read-out, and manipulation of qubits in quantum computers with multiple processor nodes. Founded in 2019, Quantum Brilliance is an Australian-German quantum computing hardware company with locations in Canberra, Australia and Stuttgart, Germany that provides diamond quantum accelerators supported by a full stack of software and application tools. They are focused on developing quantum accelerators that possess small form factors and run at room temperatures for use as accelerators that will work with classical supercomputers. For more information about this project, you can view a press release provided by Quantum Brilliance that’s available here.

January 20, 2022 - News Brief QOSF and the Unitary Fund Announce the Winner of the 2021 Wittek Quantum Prize for Open Source Software The Quantum Open Source Foundation (QOSF) and the Unitary Fund have announced Victory Omole, a software engineer at Super.tech, as the winner of the 2021 Wittek Quantum Prize for Open Source Software for his outstanding contributions to Cirq and other open-source projects. He was selected after review of 38 nominations from all over the world. Three runners up were also announced including (in no particular order) Kesha Hietala who led the design of the SQIR quantum programming language, Paul Nation who co-created QuTiP and Robert Smith who started the Quil ecosystem and open-sourced large parts of the Rigetti software stack. The Wittek prize is a yearly award that was established in 2020 in memory of Peter Wittek, a pioneer in the field of open quantum software who went missing on a mountaineering expedition in the Himalayas in 2019. The prize award is $4,000 with the intent to reward an otherwise unnoticed individual for outstanding contribution to the field of quantum open-source software. For more information about the Wittek Quantum Prize, you can view the website for it here. And for more about the selection of Victory Omole as the winner of the 2021 prize, you can view a Medium article and associated video here.

January 20, 2022 Terra Quantum and Atom Computing Each Raise $60 Million in Venture Capital In an interesting coincidence both Terra Quantum and Atom Computing have each announced new venture capital raises of $60 Million. For Terra Quantum it was an A round and for Atom Computing it was a B round. Click here to read our full article describing these events.

January 19, 2022 - News Brief Finland Launches a €10 Million ($11.35M USD) QuTI Project The Quantum Technologies Industrial (QuTI) ecosystem project will develop new components, manufacturing and testing solutions and algorithms for the needs of quantum technology. It will be coordinated by VTT Finland and include eleven additional partners from research, academia, and industry including Aalto University, Tampere University and CSC – IT Center for Science, and the industrial partners are Bluefors, Afore, Picosun, IQM Quantum Computers, Rockley Photonics, Quantastica, Saab, and Vexlum. The project will last for three years and €5.6 million of the budget will be partially funded by Business Finland, a public organization under the Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy. The project will utilize the Micronova cleanroom facility in Espoo, Finland, operated jointly by VTT and Aalto University and also another cleanroom located at Tampere University for fabrication of the optoelectronics components. Additional information about this new collaboration in Finland can be found in a press release posted on the VTT website here.

January 19, 2022 - News Brief Multiverse Adds a Fair Price Module to their Singularity Quantum Software Platform We previously reported on Multiverse’ introduction of their Singularity quantum software platform that enable inputting QC problems from an Excel spreadsheet. We also reported earlier on their work to integrate support for the IonQ ion trap processor with this software. They have now added a new module to calculate the Fair Price of a portfolio of stocks to this platform. Currently, these calculations are typically implemented in programs running on supercomputers that can look at tens of thousands of samples and run for a period of 24 hours or more. When the number of samples is decreased, the accuracy also diminishes. In a test, they showed data that indicated a 37%-43% improvement in accuracy for a quantum calculation versus a classical calculation when both are limited to 4,000 samples. The algorithm uses a quantum amplitude estimation method to estimate the mean of a novel implementation of the Gordon-Shapiro formula. For more about this Fair Pricing module, you can view a news release from Multiverse announcing it here, a video demonstration of using it here, and a technical arXiv paper that describes the algorithm here.

January 19, 2022 - News Brief IonQ and Hyundai Partner to Study Use of Quantum Computing for Researching Battery Chemistry The two companies will study the use of new variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithms to characterize different lithium compounds and the chemical reactions that could be use in battery chemistry. There have been other quantum research projects announced in the past involving battery chemistry including one between IBM and Daimler and another one between Toyota and Qunasys, however IonQ indicated that their new project will be the most advanced model to date as measured by the number of qubits and gates used. In addition, the IonQ/Hyundai research will include other lithium-based battery chemistries, including Lithium-Oxide (or Lithium-Air), whereas the IBM/Daimler study only looked at Lithium-Sulfur batteries. A Lithium-Air battery would be lighter which could provide a potential advantage in a mobile vehicle. The IonQ/Daimler simulations will require at least 12 qubits and will be able to utilize all the quantum computers commercially available at IonQ, including System 5, the latest system in private beta. Using quantum computing to discover new types of battery chemistries can have a large commercial value due to the push to increase the production and reduce the cost of batteries for use in both electric vehicles and the electrical grid to help combat global warming. In addition, the simulation of all the interactions that can take place at the molecular level are too complex for a classical computer to perform accurately. You can read the announcement provided by IonQ and Hyunda in a post located on the IonQ website here. IonQ has also posted a blog titled “Improving Battery Chemistry with Quantum Computing” that you can find here.

January 17, 2022 D-Wave Installs an Advantage Quantum Annealer at Forschungszentrum Jülich for European Access D-Wave and Forschungszentrum Jülich announced that they have installed the latest D-Wave Advantage Performance quantum annealer at the Forschungszentrum Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Julich, Germany. This 5000 qubit machine is the first Leap™ quantum cloud-based system and quantum annealer located outside North America and will be available to European users at Forschungszentrum Jülich immediately in the cloud via Leap. Click here for more.

January 16, 2022 - News Brief Caltech Constructing a New Center for Quantum Precision Measurement The new center, called the Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Center for Quantum Precision Measurement, will add to Caltech’s already substantial capability to perform research in quantum science and technology. It will be housed in a six-story building that will have two stories underground and include passageways to three adjacent research buildings on the Caltech campus to maximize collaborations between scientists. The center is being made possible with grants from The Sherman Fairchild Foundation and Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg. Activity at the center will focus on understanding quantum systems and their potential including quantum sensing, quantum information, and gravitational-wave detection. For information about this center can be seen in two different news releases shown on the Caltech website that you can find here and here.

January 15, 2022 Government Grants for Q-CTRL, Quantopticon, and Rice University Three government awards related to quantum technology were announced this week for Q-CTRL, Quantopticon, Rice University and their partners. Click here to read our article describing what these groups will be researching and the amount of funding each program will receive.

January 14, 2022 - News Brief QMware Launches their Hybrid Quantum Cloud Data Center We reported in October 2020 about the formation of the QMware joint venture between Terra Quantum and Novarion to create an integrated hardware/software appliance called the Hybrid Quantum Cloud. They have now announced the opening of a Hybrid Quantum Cloud Data Center Alpha based upon the technology. They have made this available to European enterprises, scientific laboratories and institutions. Part of the motivation for this effort to provide a European alternative to U.S. dominated quantum cloud providers based upon a European standard called GAIA-X, a project for the development of an efficient and competitive, secure and trustworthy federation of data infrastructure and service providers for Europe. This first installation has occurred at the Vienna data center of NTT Global Data Centers and additional ones are under consideration for the future. More information is available in a post on QMware’s LinkedIn page here, another post on their website here, and an article (in German) on the pressetext website here.

January 13, 2022 - News Brief Spain Forms CUCO Project to Research Potential Quantum Computing Applications The CUCO (CUantica COmputacion) consortium will include seven commercial company (Amatech, BBVA, DAS Photonics, GMV, Multiverse Computing, Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech y Repsol), five research centers (BSC, CSIC, DIPC, ICFO y Tecnalia), and public university UPV (Universitat Politècnica de València) to research potential quantum applications in industries such as energy, finance, space, defense and logistics. The project is being supported by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation under the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan with funding from CDTI (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial) a public funding agency for technology development. The project has been funded at $5.8 million and should last for two years with possible extensions later on. Activities of the project will include identifying relevant use cases for quantum computing in the Spanish economy and developing proof of concepts to show if they can provide a quantum advantage. Additional information about this project can be found in a news release posted on the Multiverse Computing website here.

January 12, 2022 - News Brief Capgemini Launches a Quantum Lab and Becomes an IBM Quantum Hub Capgemini is a French multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Paris, France. They have over 300,000 employees and reached €15.84 billion ($18B USD) in revenue in 2020. Their Quantum Lab (Q-Lab) will include facilities in the UK, Portugal, and India and they will work with clients in the areas of quantum computing, quantum communications, and quantum sensing. The key industrial sectors that they believe will benefit the most from quantum technologies include life sciences, financial services, automotive and aerospace. You can read Capgemini’s news release announcing the launch of their Quantum Lab here.

January 11, 2022 Pasqal and Qu&Co Announce Merger In another merger between a quantum hardware processor and a quantum software companies, French hardware developer Pasqal has announced a merger with Amsterdam based Qu&Co, a quantum software provider. The two companies will work to closely integrate Qu&Co’s quantum algorithm routines with Pasqal’s neutral atom-based quantum hardware to provide quantum solutions many commercial sectors including chemistry, life sciences, automotive, electronics, utilities, aerospace, defense, finance and others. Click here for more.

January 10, 2022 - News Brief LG Electronics Joins the IBM Quantum Network LG Electronics has joined the IBM Quantum Network in order to access IBM’s quantum computing systems, quantum expertise, and Qiskit software development kit. They are joining 170 other organizations including ‎ LG Electronics, Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, academic institutions and research labs that are working with IBM. LG Electronics is a large South Korean multinational electronics company with 63 trillion Won ($52 Billion USD) in revenue and over 75,000 employees. They surely have a large number of potential applications in areas including big data, artificial intelligence, connected cars, digital transformation, IoT, and robotics that could be helped through the use of quantum computing. Additional information can be found in a press release provided by IBM which can be seen here.

January 10, 2022 - News Brief D-Wave, SavantX, and Fenix Marine Services Team to Optimize Logistics at the Port of Los Angeles SavantX has announced that they have worked with Fenix Marine Services to develop a quantum powered AI engine called HONE (Hyper Optimization Nodal Efficiency) that optimizes the logistics at the Pier 300 container terminal project at the Port of Los Angeles, one of the largest marine terminals in the US. The software runs on the D-Wave quantum annealer and optimizes scheduling, appointments, and in-terminal container handling for trucking companies and their customers. The software allowed the port to handle a record 903,000 TEUs (twenty foot equivalent unit, equivalent to one 20’x20’x8′ shipping container) in October 2021. Coordinating all the many resources including ships, trucks, trains, warehouses, terminal facilities, etc. for maximum efficiency is an extremely challenging logistics and optimization problem. Obtaining the best possible efficiency has become additional critical in the past year due to the pandemic-induced buying surge which has created supply chain challenges that must be solved. Use of the optimization software can improve overall capacity, cost, predictability, turnaround times, and ROI for the shipping companies and its customers. For more about this real-world implementation, you can view a news release from Savantx which is available here.

January 8, 2022 - News Brief Michigan State University, Purdue University and the University of Michigan Form the Midwest Quantum Collaboratory (MQC) The three universities will work together on cutting edge projects related to quantum technology. Some examples of specific research goals of MQC include creating new directions to exploit entanglement in inherently scalable systems, quantum sensing, and complex systems. Another key focus of this effort will be to prepare students with the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed in this sector. It is well understood that one of the big challenges to growing the quantum industry will be to find qualified personnel for a growing quantum workforce. The MQC will not only work to provide students with scientific training, but also help them develop the necessary interpersonal skills in order to be a productive member of the quantum workforce. To learn more about the MQC, you can read a news release posted on the MSU website here and also visit the MQC website which is located here.

January 8, 2022 Who’s News – Management Updates at Quantum Computing Inc. and Q-CTRL Quantum Computing Inc. has appointed a new COO/CTO and also announced that another person has joined Board of Directors. And Q-CTRL has recruited a Chief Strategy Officer. Click here to read our article with more details.

January 7, 2022 - News Brief POLARISqb and PhoreMost Partner to Use QC for Drug Discovery POLARISqb, a quantum software company based in Durham, North Carolina, will work with PhoreMost, a drug discovery company in the UK, to help find potential drug targets that have previously been considered undruggable. PhoreMost’s SITESEEKER phenotypic screen platform identifies unexpected or “cryptic” druggable sites across the entire genome, within targets previously considered undruggable and then POLARISqb Tachyon™ quantum computing platform will use quantum algorithms to scan for billions of molecules from a large chemical space to find novel molecular drugs in minutes, rather than the months or years it would take for a classical supercomputer. The goal will be to discover and develop the next generation of oncology therapies. To see more about this partnership, you can read a news release posted on the POLARISqb website here.

January 6, 2022 Eeroq is Moving Its Headquarters to Chicago Eeroq, a quantum hardware startup developing processor based upon electrons floating above pools of superfluid helium, has signed a lease for a 9600 square foot engineering lab and office on Chicago’s West Side. The company received considerable support from the business community in Chicago including Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s INVEST South/West initiative in their search for this headquarters. To read more about Eeroq's announcment, click here to read the full article.

January 5, 2022 - News Brief Strangeworks and Quantinuum Partner to Offer Quantum-Enhanced Cryptographic Keys within the Strangeworks Ecosystem You might think it is ironic to find out a company named Strangeworks now has a product line offering random numbers to their users. But Strangeworks is indeed partnering with Quantinuum and offering access to Quantinuum’s Quantum Origin, a quantum-enhanced cryptographic keys service based on verifiable quantum randomness. A key feature of Quantum Origin is that all keys generated by the system are run through an assurance test on the key to make sure it is as unpredictable as possible before the key is sent back to the requestor. The keys can be used with current encryption algorithms such as RSA and AES used in most classical computer today and they are also usable with the new Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) keys being standardized in a selection process being run by NIST. Weak keys that an attacker can guess are a significant cause of cybersecurity issues and by using quantum technology to generate the keys that can be truly random and provide greater protection an organization that wants to keep their communications private. You can view more information about Quantum Origin in a white paper that you can see here. And you can view a news release provided by Strangeworks announcing the partnership with Quantinuum here.

January 4, 2022 French Government to Invest Over €70 Million ($79M USD) for Launch of a National Quantum Computing Platform The €70 Million represents the first funding installment out of an overall funding goal of €170 million for a project to create a hybrid computing platform that will interconnect classical systems and quantum computers. This platform will be located at the Very Large Computing Center at CEA (TGCC) and will be supported by INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology which focuses on computer science and applied mathematics. The platform will be made available toan international community of laboratories, startups and industrial companies. This effort is part of the overall French national strategy of quantum technologies that will invest €1.8 Billion ($2M USD) over a period from 2021-2025 with a goal of creating 16,000 quantum jobs by 2030. For more information about this investment and the French quantum computing strategy, you can read a news release provided by the French government here and a document that describes the overall French quantum computing strategy here. (Hint: Both of those documents are in French, but you can use Google Translate to translate them to English or any of the other languages it supports.)

January 3, 2022 Russian Scientists Create Quantum Device Using Qutrits and Ququarts Russian scientists from the Russian Quantum Center and the P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences are utilizing the phenomena of qutrits and ququarts to construct the equivalent of a four-qubit ion trap computer using only two physical ions. This is a step in their effort to provide cloud access to a universal quantum computer by the end of 2024. Click here for more.

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