News Brief

The funding will allow Virgina Tech to create a new Center of Quantum Architecture and Software Development on the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus. It will supplement another $15.8 million in funding that was already planned by the Virgina Tech Innovation Campus. This support will be used to establish an endowed faculty position at the center, endow five to ten graduate fellowships, help connect Northrup Grumman experts with Virgina Tech faculty, create pathway programs to engage K-12 students, and support master of engineering projects in computer science and computer engineering. Construction of the innovation campus broke ground in Alexandria, Virginia in September [...]

Quantum memories are devices that store and release entangled photon qubits. They are a key component for creating quantum repeaters that would allow quantum communications over long distances and enable a quantum internet and there are many research activities around the world to develop this technology. Qunnect, located in Brooklyn, New York, is a spinout from research originally performed at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York to commercialize this and other components needed quantum communication. The quantum memory device is based upon a technology called Electromagnetically Induced Transparency (EIT) and has a unique feature that it operates at room [...]

Quandela is a French quantum hardware startup that is planning on offering an online photonic based quantum computer in 2022. They were founded in 2017 as a spinoff of the Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at CNRS. A key product for Quandela is the Prometheus, a photonic qubit generator with broad applications in quantum computing, quantum cryptography and quantum sensors. They also offer quantum photonic components to companies and research centers around the world. Omnes was the lead investor in this round with additional participation from Quantonation and the Defence Innovation Fund managed by Bpifrance. More details about this funding are available [...]

The IQM superconducting quantum computer will be integrated within a high performance computing (HPC) installation at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) near Munich. Other partners in this activity include Atos, Europe's leading HPC company, and HQS, a quantum software startup company. Q-Exa is a €45.3 million ($51M USD) consortium project with major funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) that will research making quantum acceleration of HPC applications a reality. More about the Q-Exa project and integration of IQM's quantum computing can be found in a news release available here. November 15, 2021

The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), a consortium established in 2018 by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of stakeholders that aims to enable and grow the quantum industry has announced that it will start accepting Tier-2 memberships from non-U.S. corporations located in certain countries approved by the QED-C steering committee. The list of countries currently includes  Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the UK with more expected to be approved in the future. More information about membership in QED-C can be found on their Membership webpage here. November 15, 2021

Agnostiq, a Canadian quantum software startup, will build software on top of Xanadu's Pennylane that solves various financial problems such as portfolio optimization, derivatives pricing, and currency arbitrage. Pennylane software is a quantum machine learning library that supports a very wide variety of the different hardware platforms that are currently available. By leveraging this software Agnostiq will be able to accelerate the availability of its solutions since it can concentrate its resources more on the end applications rather than the fundamental algorithms that are common with quantum machine learning and variational quantum computing. In addition, it provides more flexibility for Agnostiq's [...]

Classiq, an Israeli quantum software startup company, has joined the Sequoia project which will focus on software engineering of industrial, hybrid quantum applications and algorithms. The project is coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO with additional partners including Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF, Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, University of Tübingen, Chair of Embedded Systems, FZI Research Center for Information Technology, University of Stuttgart, High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, and the University of Stuttgart, Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS). The project is funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labour [...]

IQM, a superconducting quantum processor startup headquartered in Espoo, Finland, has opened a dedicated fabrication facility in Espoo, Finland. The size of this Class 100 facility is 560 square meters (about 4000 square feet) and will cost about € 20 million ($22.9M USD). The pilot line at this facility is being installed with the first full production run scheduled for the first half of 2022 with additional production capacity later in 2022. The company has received €71 million in funding to date and has also received a contract from VTT in Finland to build the country's first commercial 54 qubit quantum [...]

One of the most critical subsystems in a superconducting quantum computer is the portion of the machine that contains the control electronics. These electronics generate the microwave pulses that are used to control the qubits to implement the various gates needed to run a quantum program. Up until now, an engineer developing a quantum processor would need to chose from purchasing commercial control electronics from one of the companies specializing in these products or designing their own from scratch. Now the Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has designed key low-noise RF mixing modules that [...]

We described last August Multiverse's Singularity quantum software solution for financial applications. This software can enable financial institutions to model real-life financial problems such as Fair Price calculations, portfolio creation and optimization, ETF replication, risk valuation, and many other simulations with speed and accuracy. One thing that is highly significant about this software is that it can take input in the form of an Excel spreadsheet and then automatically translate that problem statement into a program that can run be on a quantum computer. This makes it significantly easier for a user to start access the power of a quantum computer. [...]