The UK’s national metrology institute, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), has secured £230,000 ($307.5K USD) in funding from the Government Office for Technology Transfer (GOTT) to accelerate the commercial development and scalable manufacturing of trapped-ion quantum computing hardware.
Administered under GOTT’s Knowledge Asset Grant Fund (KAGF), the grant addresses critical fabrication yield and packaging bottlenecks limiting chip-scale ion trap production. Trapped-ion systems offer high gate fidelity, longer coherence times, and architectural stability, but scaling from single processing nodes to multi-node quantum networks requires microfabricated ion traps that can be reliably batch-produced and packaged at scale.
| [ NPL Trapped-Ion Technology Development & Deployment Milestones ] | ||
|---|---|---|
| Hardware Architecture | Manufacturing & Packaging Objective | Ecosystem Integration Endpoint |
| • Microfabricated Ion Microtrap | • Chip-scale planar trap for trapping and manipulating ion arrays | • Deployed for quantum computing and quantum networking research at Oxford and NPL. |
| • Batch Packaging Process | • GOTT-funded process optimization to increase fabrication yields | • Overcomes final-stage assembly bottlenecks to support high-volume manufacturing. |
| • Networked Quantum Compute | • Scalable interconnect packaging for multi-node trapped-ion QPUs | • Integrated into National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) testbed facilities. |
Building on previous KAGF support—which enabled the first installation of an NPL microtrap system inside the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC)—the new funding focuses on establishing a standardized batch packaging framework. By improving production yield and packaging reliability, NPL aims to strengthen the UK’s domestic quantum hardware supply chain and transition laboratory prototypes into deployable commercial components.
Review the announcement on the NPL Portal here and explore research initiatives on the NPL Quantum Programme here.
October 22, 2026