Rigetti Computing, Inc., in collaboration with Riverlane and the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), has been selected as one of the winners of Innovate UK’s Quantum Missions pilot competition. The £3.5 million ($4.7 million USD) Rigetti-led consortium will leverage Rigetti’s superconducting quantum computer hosted at the NQCC to benchmark and enhance quantum error correction (QEC) capabilities, a critical step toward achieving universal, fault-tolerant quantum computing. As part of the initiative, Rigetti will upgrade its UK-based quantum computer to a 36-qubit quantum processing unit (QPU) from the current 24 qubits and integrate its latest generation control system to enable low-latency interfacing with Riverlane’s Quantum Error Correction Stack.
The project will address key challenges facing large-scale QEC integration, including mitigating processing bottlenecks in classical control systems and improving the high error rates typical in today’s superconducting quantum hardware. Riverlane will lead the QEC experiments to identify system improvements and meet critical performance metrics, while the NQCC Superconducting Circuits Team will support system upgrades and quality assurance. Rigetti’s modular and open architecture, combined with Riverlane’s QEC expertise, aims to demonstrate real-time error correction improvements essential for scaling superconducting quantum computers toward practical use cases.
In addition to this project, Rigetti secured two more Innovate UK Quantum Missions awards: a collaboration with SEEQC to integrate digital chip-based control with Rigetti’s 9-qubit Novera™ QPU, and a separate project with TreQ, Qruise, Q-CTRL, and Oxford Ionics to develop an open-architecture quantum computing testbed. These projects build upon Rigetti’s leadership in the UK quantum ecosystem, including its operational deployment of the first quantum computer at the NQCC and the ongoing £10 million ($13.2M USD) initiative to install a quantum system at Oxford Instruments’ Tubney Woods facility.
Read the full announcement from Rigetti here.
April 22, 2025
