News Brief

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 [...]

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 to an international community of laboratories, startups and industrial companies. This effort is part of the overall French national strategy of quantum [...]

Quantinuum (formerly Honeywell Quantum Solutions) has released a new quantum processor they call the H1-2. This machine is an upgrade of their previous H1-1 processor with two additional qubits and better gate and measurement fidelities. The H1-2 is very similar to the H1-1 as it uses the same ion-trap architecture, control system design, integrated optics, and photonics as its predecessor. But now the H1-2 has 12 operational qubits instead of the previous 10 qubits and has implemented minor upgrades to improve the fidelities and other aspects of the design. Many of these upgrades were also applied to the H1-1. These improvements [...]

The new office will be located in Paris and will be the fourth European office for IQM, joining other offices in Bilbao, Spain, Munich, German, and Espoo, Finland. The company has a unique co-design approach to develop quantum processors optimized for particular use cases. The Paris office will work with customers in the aviation, space, and cybersecurity industry for these solutions. The company will work with Atos as part of their Scaler program and provide additional focus on HPC integration and offer quantum accelerators to supercomputing centers worldwide. It will also give the company another source of talent and make it [...]

The project, called ATIQ, will receive most of its funding, €37.5 million. from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and will have a duration of 5 years starting on December 1, 2021. It will have 25 collaborators and will be organized by the Leibniz Universität Hannover. Additional partners including Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, University of Siegen, TU Braunschweig, RWTH Aachen, Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Fraunhofer- Gesellschaft, the companies AMO GmbH, AKKA Industry Consulting GmbH, Black Semiconductor GmbH, eleQtron GmbH, FiberBridge Photonics GmbH, Infineon Technologies AG, JoS QUANTUM GmbH, LPKF Laser & Electronics AG, Parity Quantum Computing Germany GmbH, QUARTIQ GmbH, Qubig [...]

Quix Quantum has sold another of their photonic processors to the Hungarian Quantum Information National Laboratory and the Faculties of Science and of Informatics at Eötvös Loránd University. This chip will be the first piece of quantum hardware in the Central and Eastern European region that will know about and will be used by the university for academic research into photonic quantum computing. Quix' product is a 12-mode quantum photonic processor which they have also sold to other organizations including Paderborn University, Quandela, and Qontrol. You can view an announcement about the sale provided by Quix in a press release that [...]

Rigetti Computing indicated that for the first nine months of 2021 ending October 31, 2021 they achieved $6.9 million in revenue with a net operating loss of ($26.2) million. The results showed a 68% increase in revenue and a 3% decrease in operating loss from the same period in 2020. It also compares favorably to a projection they provided in an Investor Presentation last October forecasting revenue of $7 million and an EBITDA of ($31) million for the full 12 months of 2021. Rigetti also recapped in their announcement a number of developments in the technical, industry collaboration, customer, customer application, [...]

Equal, a quantum hardware startup with headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, received the award from the European Innovation Council (EIC) to work on quantum-enhanced machine learning. The funds will be provided in a mixture of grants and equity investment. Equal1 was one of 99 companies based in 21 different countries that have received funding under the EIC program. Equal1 is a spinout of University College Dublin and has been developing a silicon-based qubit technology with a focus of applying it to ML applications. They previously had received €10 million ($11.6M USD) in venture investments with the latest round announced last October. For more, you can [...]

Creating the optimum plan and schedule for activities such as logistics, air traffic control, industrial automation, resource allocation, disaster recovery assistance, etc. can get very complicated as the number of variables increases. At a certain point the computation becomes too difficult for a classical computer to perform optimally so the data analyst needs to resort to approximation methods which won't provide the best possible answer. This is where quantum computing can help because it can potentially allow the computation of more complex, yet more accurate solutions for these problems. The three-year program will initially use Pasqal's 100+ qubit processor and possible [...]

QuTech, a Dutch partnership between TU Delft and TNO, has signed a memorandum of understanding with German research organization Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to explore quantum communication infrastructures for cross-border quantum networks. One of the first projects will be to deploy a quantum key distribution (QKD) network across borders between hubs in Germany and The Netherlands. They will also continue their joint research on integrated quantum photonic devices needed in these networks. The two organizations had already been working together to develop a quantum frequency converter (QFC) as part of the ICON project. Additional information about the collaborations between QuTech and Fraunhofer is available [...]