News Brief

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

Quix 20 Mode Quantum Photonic Chip. Photo Credit: PHIX bv 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 [...]

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 13, 2022

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 [...]

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 [...]

Picture of the QICK design. The left PCB is the evalutaiton board which contains the Xilinx FPGA. The right PCB is the RF board which can implement additional signal downconversion, amplication, and filtering. Credit: Fermilab 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 [...]

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 Services support 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 [...]

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. [...]