News Brief

Diagram of TuringQ's 3D Photonic Quantum Chip. Credit: TuringQ 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Blockchain Application Test Configuration. Credit: JPMorgan Chase, Toshiba, and Ciena 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 [...]

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 [...]

Chain of 35 Barium Ions in an IonQ system. Credit: IonQ 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, [...]

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 OurCrowd. 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 [...]