In a webinar presentation today, French quantum hardware manufacturer Pasqal has released a roadmap for its hardware and software development and also has described some of the early customers and applications who are working with their neutral atom based machine. The company has an aggressive schedule for improving their hardware along several fronts including the number of qubits, repetition rate, gate operations per calculation, hours of QPU availability, and software features. They are also working to expand the number of manufacturing facilities with a new one in Sherbrooke, Quebec slated to build and deliver a machine to its first customer later this year. Pasqal is currently working with over 50 customers who are testing out their applications and the company hopes that some of them will be able to move their application to regular production by 2025.
The company indicates that their next machine, called Orion Beta, will be coming out later this year. It will have up to 1,000 qubits and support about 5 million gate operations. It can be ordered for on-premise delivery and the company has already received initial orders for this processor. A follow-on processor, called Orion Gamma, is expected roughly in the 2025 timeframe. It will offer ultra high-fidelity gates, support about 10 millions gate operations, and improved availability for users. The 2026 timeframe will see Pasqal’s first machine that will support a scalable logical qubit architecture with a processor called Vela. That machine will support as many as 10,000 qubits, improve the repetition rate by over 3 times, support about 40 million gate operations, and provide a continued improvement availability for end users. Around 2027, a follow-on processor called Pegasus is planned. Pegasus would still contain as many as 10,000 qubits but provide a significant jump in gate operations to 200 million and another improvement in availability for end users. The final processor shown on their roadmap is the Centaurus slated for the 2028+ timeframe. This QPU would be a full fault tolerant quantum computer (FTQC) that would support 128 logical qubits, over 200 million gate operations, an order of magnitude jump in repetition rate, and further improvements in the hours of user availability.
Pasqal also is a full-stack provider and will continue to enhance their current graphic user interface software platform called Pulser by adding a package called Qadence along with other solvers and emulators.
Pasqal has issued a press release to announce their roadmap and it can be accessed here. In addition, the company hosted a webinar to go over the applications they are working on with customers and also to discuss the roadmap in more detail. A recording of that webinar is available here.
March 12, 2024