News Brief

LHZ scheme unit cell (left) and diagram of scaled up architecture (right). Credit: NEC. 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 ParityQC 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 4, 2022