News Brief

The Chicago Quantum Exchange is anchored by the University of Chicago and includes government and goverment organizations Argonne National Laboratory, National Accelerator Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University. The new corporate partners for the Chicago Quantum Exchange include Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS), Hamamatsu Photonics, Protiviti, Quantum Machines, and Super.tech. In addition, P33, a non-profit innovation promotion group for Chicago has also joined. This brings the total number of partners for the exchange to 18. The exchange and its partners will collaborate on research to advance quantum science and engineering, hold workshops to develop new [...]

The University of California, Berkeley professor was a founder of both Cadence Design Systems and Synopsis. Quantum Motion is developing quantum devices based upon scalable silicon processing that can be manufactured in a semiconductor wafer fab. Professor Sangiovanni-Vincentelli’s long experience with the semiconductor and electronics industries should be quite helpful to Quantum Motion’s efforts as they proceed with their developments.  For more, you can view the news release from Quantum Motion here.

Total SE is one of the largest energy companies in the world and is headquartered in France. They will be using QC Ware’s Forge cloud services platform to model continuous variables and run optimization use cases that are critical to Total’s operations. With 2019 revenue of over $200 billion and over 100,000 employees, Total will certainly have many highly complex computational problems that could potentially make use of quantum computation in the future.  For more on QC Ware’s work with Total, you can view a press release on the QC Ware web site here. 

The Series A funding was led by MIG Fonds with additional participation from Tesi, OpenOcean, Maki.vc, Vito Ventures, Matadero QED, Vsquared, Salvia GmbH, Santo Venture Capital GmbH, and Tencent. IQM is designing a superconducting quantum computing and is based in Espoo, Finland with a subsidiary in Munich, Germany. This fundraising round is one of the larger private fundings for quantum in Europe and their team of over 70 employees is also among the larger quantum teams in Europe. IQM’s strategy is a little different from other quantum hardware companies because they are looking to provide on-premises quantum computers to research laboratories [...]

The project will be led by M-Squared Lasers, a developer or photonics and quantum technology with additional participation from Oxford Ionics, Orca Computing, Kelvin Nanotechnology, TMD Technologies, the Universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde, and Oxford, and the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL).  The three year project is partially funded by the UK’s Quantum Technologies Challenge, led by UK Research and Innovation. The project will research three methods enabled by photonics for creating high fidelity qubits. These methods include neutral atoms, ion traps, and optical qubits with a goal of increasing both qubit fidelities and scalability for commercial implementations.  The project is also [...]

The round was led by Global Frontier Investments and LCP Quantum Partners with additional participation from Maverick Ventures and Foundry Group. ColdQuanta, founded in 2007 as a spin-off from the University of Colorado, Boulder, utilizes cold atom technology for the development of quantum computers, quantum positioning systems, and real-time quantum signal processing based on ColdQuanta’s Quantum Core™ technology. This brings to total amount of funding the company has received to date to $48.75 million. The company has already received government contracts and other awards of $30 million since its founding. Additional information is available in the news release from ColdQuanta here. November 5, [...]

IBM has introduced a revamped chemistry module and a new gradients module into Qiskit in an effort to make their quantum computers easier to use for people who understand their own application domain but are not quantum experts.  The Qiskit Chemistry module contains algorithms for calculating molecules’ electronic and vibronic structure, plus algorithmic primitives to serve as the building blocks for higher level applications.  The Qiskit Gradients framework provides an automated way of computing analytical gradients.  This is useful for quantum chemistry because many of the algorithms it uses are variational and involve classical and quantum computers working together to find [...]

Atos which has been offering their Quantum Learning Machine, a device which performs quantum simulation using classical computing chips, has announced a partnership with quantum startup Pasqal to develop an offering based on Paqal’s neutral atom technology.  At a recent bpifrance Quantum Computing Business conference, Elie Girard, Atos CEO, indicated a company goal of providing a hybrid classical/quantum solution by 2023 which would likely use this technology.  We had recently published a report on Pasqal’s roadmap to develop a 200 qubit machine by 2021.  Pasqal has been very busy establishing partnerships with other quantum players this year including collaborations with ParityQC, [...]

A collaboratory was first described by computer scientist Dr. William Wulf in 1989, as a “center without walls in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries.” This collaboratory will establish relationships with universities and other organizations to understand the limits of quantum technology as well as support an expanded quantum workforce and quantum infrastructures like quantum foundries that will make it easier for someone to create a quantum device.  For more information on the LPS Qubit Collaboratory, you can [...]

The funding was provided by the province of Alberta’s Major Innovation Fund to aid the university’s Quantum Alberta network. The province says the funding will lead to “research that will help establish Alberta as a national and international hub for quantum computing and related spinoff industries” and help diversify their economy.  For more on this funding, you can view an article in the Calgary Herald here. October 31, 2020