News Brief

QuSecure, a company founded in 2019 and located in San Mateo, California, has secured a SBIR Phase III contract to implement their QuProtect post-quantum cryptographic solution to more than a dozen Federal Government agencies. Previously the company had started with a Phase I award from the U.S. Air Force in March 2020 to demonstrate their solution and a follow-on Phase II award in early 2022. This Phase III award will allow them to commercialize their technology. This Phase III award is the only one so far awarded by the U.S. government for post quantum cryptography and makes the company the Federal [...]

The qBraid Lab SDK created by qBraid has three interesting features that can make it easier and faster for an end user to run a circuit on multiple platforms. The first is a "write-once-and-submit" function which can allow a user to create a circuit and submit it to multiple quantum hardware platforms and simulators without having to individually submit each one. The second is a circuit transpiler that supports over 20 different quantum hardware and simulation platforms that will take a circuit written in one quantum language and convert it so it can run on the many platforms including IBM Qiskit, [...]

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 was led 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Chart Showing the Recent Progression of Quantinuum;s Ion Trap Prcoessors. Credit: Quantinuum 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 they 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 [...]