France Unveils Proposed National Strategy for Quantum Technologies

After several months of hearings in 2019, French Parliament member Paula Forteza has presented a plan to structure a national strategy for quantum technologies. In reviewing the significant investments that have already been started in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Canada, Australia and other countries, France does not want to be left behind. The 68 page plan, with the title “Quantum: the technological turn that France will not miss” calls for an investment of 1.4 billion Euros over five years from sources including the public sector, private sector, local governments, and European Union support. Other key elements of the plan include:

• Listing of 37 specific proposal (shown below)
• Formation of 20 exploratory projects with annual budgets of up to 10 million Euros per year
• Creation of 3 Centers of Excellence
• Launch of 50 quantum startups by 2024
• Establishment of a late stage investment fund of 300 to 500 million Euros

The full plan has been published in French and you can view it here.  We are not aware of an English version available at this time, but we have gone ahead and translated the 37 proposals which have been organized by category and you can see the translations below.

Common proposals for all technologies

Proposal 5
Renew, from 2021, the calls for projects (AAPR) of the axis “Quantum Technologies” of the National Agency for Research (ANR) aiming to finance twenty projects annually exploratory for a global annual envelope of 10 M €.

Proposal 6
Reinforce the “Quantum Technologies” axis of the ANR with a specific annual envelope to finance three projects exploratory targeting priority technological paths identified.

Proposal 7
Encourage French laboratories and companies to respond to “Quantum Technologies” European flagship calls for projects.

Proposal 8
Include a priority on quantum technologies in the future PSPC and Innovation Contest calls.

Proposal 26
Create three “Hubs” in Paris, Saclay and Grenoble Quantics ”bringing together researchers in quantum physics, theoretical and applied IT researchers, engineers, industrialists in technological fields, and end users.

Proposal 27
Integrate an evaluation criterion relating to interdisciplinarity in ANR and BPI calls for collaborative projects.

Proposal 28
Include 6 ECTS of quantum algorithmics in the top 20 cycles of computer engineers and 6 ECTS in cryptography post-quantum and quantum in cryptography masters.

Proposal 29
Design training paths with a specialization in engineering and quantum computing and anticipate the growing need for engineers and technicians in the supply chains industrial.

Proposal 30
Sensitize ecosystem players to the new provisions of the PACTE law relating to the mobility of researchers and access using laboratories by startups.

Proposal 31
Support the creation of around fifty startups in the quantum until 2024.

Proposal 32
Create a late-stage investment fund for € 300-500 million trust dedicated to quantum startups.

Proposal 33
Sensitize the various most strategic players to risks technological looting and the tools available to face it.

Proposal 34
Identify and monitor strategic assets and activities and deploy, if necessary, the Potential Protection system Scientific and Technological (PPST).

Proposal 35
Identify areas of cooperation and possible synergies with France’s international partners in terms of quantum technologies.

Proposal 36
Establish a Strategic Committee responsible for taking the orientation decisions for research actions.

Proposal 37
Appoint an interministerial coordinator of the national plan, responsible for ensuring the overall coherence of the actions of different public and private actors at the national level.

Proposals relating to quantum computing

Proposal 1
Host, at the “Very Large Computing Center” (TGCC), a diversified, scalable and accessible to communities of researchers and developers academic and industrial.

Proposal 2
Open a permanent call for contributions to French and European startups and laboratories developing quantum acceleration processors for integration to the computing infrastructure.

Proposal 3
Develop a public-private offer of QCaaS or “Quantum Computing as a Service”competitive.

Proposal 9
Strengthen Grenoble microelectronic teams with skills in computing software and architectures.

Proposal 10
Deploy agile project management to reduce gradually uncertainties and costs throughout the project.

Proposal 11
Deploy, through a PIA and PPR action, an R & D-Capitalization program aimed at developing scalable quantum accelerators.

Proposal 12
Support, through the AAPR of the “Quantum Technologies” axis ANR, a research program aimed at exploring Bold Silicon Ways

Proposal 13
Set up, in 2019, a Grand Innovation Challenge “NISQ” aiming to develop, before 2023, a business software stack interoperable for the chemical, logistics and of AI.

Proposal 14
Include the Grand Défi in a framework of bilateral collaborations with other European countries.

Proposal 15
Strengthen research resources in algorithms and software in the field of quantum computing.

Proposal 16
Set up, in 2022, a Grand Innovation Challenge aimed at develop a complete quantum computing solution, under reserve of convincing intermediate results for the Grand Défi “NISQ” and for the PIA action “quantum accelerators”.

Proposal 17
Include specifications for the acquisition of accelerators experimental quantum in certain calls for tenders GENCI relating to the acquisition, renewal and extension of the French supercomputer fleet.

Proposal 24
Disseminate the use of quantum computing, through “Challenges” and “Hackathons” offered by industrialists in the sectors most advanced applications. The “Airbus Quantum Computing Challenge” could be taken as a model.

Proposals relating to quantum sensors

Proposal 18
Structuring through a succession of i-Lab, i-Nov and PSPC-Région an industrial value chain for the production of diamond-based impurity sensors.

Proposal 25
Support, through “Challenges” offered by application sectors, manufacturers of quantum sensors in looking for outlets in the application sectors.

Proposals relating to cryptography post-quantum and quantum

Proposal 4
Deploy a test platform for different devices quantum communications.

Proposal 19
Support, through i-Nov competitions and support systems and accelerating the innovation of the ministries concerned, the development, before 2022, of a competitive offer of post-quantum cryptography for resource systems limited calculation.

Proposal 20
Develop a strategy for evaluating QKD systems based on the French and European certification scheme.

Proposal 21
Support, through the AAPR of the “Quantum Technologies” axis of the ANR, a research action relating to the maturation of the QKD technology (continuous variable and variable systems discrete, quantum relays, satellite links, etc.) involving quantum communications experts, cybersecurity experts and telecom equipment manufacturers.

Enabling Technology Proposals

Proposal 22
Support, through the i-Lab competitions, the i-Nov competitions and PSPC projects, the development of a French offer competitive in ultrahigh vacuum and compact cryogenics for temperatures from 1 to 40K.

Proposal 23
Support, through i-Lab competitions, i-Nov competitions, PSPC projects and support and acceleration devices innovation of the ministries concerned, or an action of the PIA, the development of a competitive French offer in terms of extreme cryogenics for sub-K temperatures.

January 11, 2020

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IBM Discusses Quantum Computing Applications and Customers at CES

dougfinke12020-01-08T21:00:29-08:00

In a large presentation at today’s CES show, IBM described how they are making progress in acquiring customers and working with them to develop applications that will take advantage of quantum computing.  Highlights of their presentation include:

• They have expanded their IBM Q Network to include over 100 organizations in industries as far ranging as airlines, automotive, banking and finance, energy, insurance, materials and electronics.
• They recently expanded their startup partners in the IBM Q Network by adding five new companies.  By our count, they now have partnerships with 27 different startup companies.
• They described research efforts with Daimler AG (parent of Mercedes) to use quantum computers to model next generation lithium-sulfur batteries for automobiles.
• They are entering a multi-year collaborative effort with Delta Airlines to explore applications of quantum computing in the airline industry.
• They now have over 200, 000 users of their IBM Q systems who have run hundreds of billions of executions on either the simulator or the actual quantum machines.  These users have generated over 200 third-party research papers.

Although the current generation of machines may not be quite powerful enough to provide an advantage over the use of a classical computer for commercial applications, it is clear that they are confident they will have more powerful generations of quantum computers in the years ahead that will be able to demonstrate a quantum advantage. So they are taking steps right now to prepare as many customers as possible to utilize quantum computers.  As such, IBM is devoting significant resources into marketing and applications as a strategy to recreate the success they had in the 1960’s when they dominated mainframe computing.

For more on IBM’s quantum customer announcements, you can view three separate press releases describing their work with Delta Airlines, Daimler, and other organizations.

January 8, 2020

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IBM Doubles Their Quantum Volume Performance Metric to 32

dougfinke12020-01-08T17:55:03-08:00

We had previously reported on IBM’s Quantum Volume metric and their goal of achieving a doubling of this measure every year. This factor takes into account a number of factors including qubit count, qubit quality, qubit connectivity, crosstalk considerations and a number of other factors to provide a relative figure of merit for a quantum computer design.  This metric is technology agnostic and could conceivable be used by other gate level quantum computer developers.

In March of 2019, they announced that they had increased this factor to 16 with the announcement of their IBM Q System One.  Now, they have announced they have doubled this once again to 32 with a new 28 qubit design called Raleigh. This design combines the lattice structure of the 53 qubit design (the 28 qubit would appear to look roughly like half of the 53 qubit design) that they introduced last year with additional upgrades implemented in some of the latter versions of the 20 qubit design.

Although it might not seem obvious why a 28 qubit part would show a higher metric of their 53 qubit design, the answer is that the Quantum Volume metric assumes a square circuit of m qubits with a depth of m gates.  And the limiting factor right now appears to be the gate depth that can be used before the errors become too great.  For more on this, you can view IBM’s paper describing the quantum volume metric and measurement methodology here.

IBM has prepared a good blog article that describes their generation cycles of learning and plans to provide continued improvement. Among other things they will take some of the advancements created in this 28 qubit design and apply it to subsequent generations of the 53 qubit design.  In addition, they have several other improvements ideas generated from their research that they intend to apply in the future to further improve the qubit quality.

One thing to mention is that the nature of the Quantum Volume metric is to treat equal importance to the width of the qubits and the gate depth so that both are equal to achieve essentially a square circuit configuration. However, it is not clear how many quantum algorithms are configured this way.  Certain algorithms being researched for NISQ applications, such as QAOA, are called “short depth” algorithms where the number of qubits may be significantly larger than the gate depth to minimize the effect of decoherence. For more, you can view IBM’s latest blog describing this new development here.

January 8, 2020

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Quantum Machines Announces its Quantum Orchestration Platform

dougfinke12020-01-07T14:30:40-08:00

Building a quantum computer requires assembling a lot of different pieces.  This includes the quantum chip, the control electronics and control firmware, mechanical packaging, software, libraries, etc.  The complexity of assembling all these pieces can be a big challenge.  Although a large company like IBM can assemble the diverse set of talent to do all of this, it has been much more difficult for a small startup or even a university research organization to build their own a quantum computer with all the pieces unless they are very well funded.

This is where Quantum Machines’ Quantum Orchestration Platform fits in.  Although there are many efforts to build quantum chips, the complexity of providing the necessary control electronics and control firmware and software to control the chips can be just as difficult and the expertise to do this may not be as readily available.  The Quantum Orchestration Platform provides a solution for those teams that want to bring in this capability from the outside instead of designing it themselves.  The diagram below shows where their technology would fit into the stack.

Diagram that Shows Where the Quantum Orchestration Platform Fits In the Stack

The platform consists of device called an Analog Front-End & Pulse Processor and associated firmware that can perform all the pulse generation, readout, control flow and classical processing capabilities needed.  Multiple units can be ganged together to provide integrated capability for more channels. Quantum Machines indicates that their platform has been designed with flexibility in mind and can work with many different qubit implementation technologies including superconducting, trapped ions, NV centers, quantum dots, and topological qubits. Quantum Machines has also created their own programming language called Qua for programming the system.

Quantum Machines Analog Front-End & Pulse Processor

Although some vendors can supply some of the pieces needed in that critical middle layers of the stack, Quantum Machines product is interesting because they are uniquely providing an integrated hardware and software capability for these middle layers. This will make it easier for organizations to build a quantum computer with the chips they have developed. Quantum Machines indicates that their product is already in use within multiple organizations including multinational corporations, quantum startups, government laboratories, and academic institutions in six countries.  For more details on the Quantum Orchestration Platform, you can visit the Quantum Machines web site here.

January 7, 2020

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Quantum Computing Outlook for 2020

The year 2019 was a busy year in the quantum community with a lot of new developments and announcements.  We are sure that 2020 will be just as busy, if not more so, and expect continued advances.  We have seen some of the roadmaps that folks in the industry have discussed so with our intrepid 20/20 vision (pardon the pun!) we will describe some of the developments that we expect to see this year.

Hardware

Hardware providers will continue to make advances in both qubit count, qubit quality and new technologies in 2020.  Things we expect to see include:

• In September 2018, Rigetti announced a new architecture they call Aspen starting with a 16 qubit chip, advancing to an intermediate density of 32 or 64 qubits with a large version of 128 qubits in their roadmap.  In December they announced their 32 qubit version, called Aspen-7, which will run on both Rigetti’s QCS as well as Amazon’s Braket cloud services.  In 2020, we expect that they will announce availability of the 128 qubit version on these services too.

• In October 2019, Google announced that they successfully completed their quantum supremacy experiment with their 53 qubit Sycamore chip.  Since then they have hinted at various industry conferences that they are working on a 57+ qubit version of this chip with some improved qubit quality metrics.  We think the reason for the “+” is that the chip may have 59 or 60 qubits in the design, but a few might not work due to mechanical or yield failures.  However, they have indicated that a large focus of their 2020 activity will be to improve the gate fidelities.  In particular, their current Sycamore had an average 0.62% two-qubit simultaneous gate error and they would like to get that down to 0.1%.

• IBM has publicly declared their intention to double what they call Quantum Volume every year.  Qubit Volume is a metric that can provide a general description of a machines power that takes into account the number of qubits, the quality of the qubits and other factors.  When they announced their 20 qubit IBM Q System One in 2019 they indicated that they had achieved a Quantum Volume factor of 16 with the design.  In September 2019, they announced a 53 qubit machine, but have not yet announced an associated Quantum Volume metric for it. We suspect they are still calibrating it and tuning it up for peak performance and they are waiting until this is done before announcing a quantum volume.  In any case, we do expect them to hit a goal of a doubling of Quantum Volume to 32 in 2020 either with this 53 qubit machine or perhaps something else they may have in development.

• Another new superconducting entrant in 2020 will be Quantum Circuits Inc. (QCI).  They have announced a partnership with Microsoft that will serve as their cloud provider.  Not many details are public about their quantum computer, but we expect to hear more in the coming year.

• 2020 should be a big year for D-Wave with the production release of their 5000+ qubit Advantage architecture based upon their Pegasus chip.  This architecture should bring substantial improvements in performance due to the increase number of qubits,improved coherence times, and better qubit connectivity.

  We are aware that D-Wave is working on a technology called nonstoquastic Hamiltonian which allows qubits to be coupled with two degrees of freedom rather than the current one degree of freedom.  This technology can substantially improve the problem solving capability of the quantum annealing machines.  Although we do not expect this to be included initial in the 2020 Advantage machines, we would expect them to announce a roadmap indicating that this technology will be incorporated in follow-on machines in the 2021-2022 time frame.

• 2020 will see the first public availability of several cloud based ion trap machines from IonQ, Honeywell, and Alpine Quantum Technologies (AQT).  IonQ and Honeywell will be partnering with Microsoft and AWS to provide cloud access, but it is not yet known if they will also offer their own cloud services. AQT has some interesting possibilities because their ion trap hardware is now programmable via both Google’s Cirq as well as IBM’s Qiskit (see below).

• We also expect to see cloud availability of photonic technologies from Xanadu.  They use a different type of element called qumodes rather than qubits.  Qumodes are continuously variable elements and may have some advantages for certain computations.  Xanadu current has a 12 qumode machine in the lab and expect to be offering one with 50+ qumodes by the end of 2020. Another distinguishing feature of photonic technologies is that they do not require the expensive dilution refrigerators that are needed by the other technologies.

• Another new technology introduction that we expect to see in 2020 is the first cloud based computer based upon spin qubit technology.  QuTech is working on a project called Quantum Inspire and we expect them to announce in 2020 cloud availability of a small quantum machine based on their spin qubit technology.

• Many other players are working on hardware technologies, but we are not certain how many will be announced in 2020.  These include Alibaba (superconducting), Atom Computing (neutral atoms), ColdQuanta (cold atoms), Eeroq (cold atoms), PsiQuantum (photonic), Intel (spin qubits), IQM (superconducting), Microsoft (topological), Silicon Quantum Computing (spin qubits) and several others.  Although we believe most of these efforts will still be in development in 2020, we would not be surprised if one or two announce public availability before the year is out.

Cloud Services

The end of 2019 saw significant announcements from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to provide cloud services for multiple different hardware platforms. We expect to see several additional cloud services announcements in 2020 and we expect to see more of these multi-platform arrangements where a cloud service will support several different hardware platforms including:

• We expect Google to take steps in 2020 to make their machine more available on the cloud.  Google has their own Google Cloud Services group so we expect them to leverage those capabilities and compete with Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon AWS Braket services.  In addition, we note that AQT has also announced it is compatible with Google’s Cirq software so this might provide an alternate platform for Google to support in a cloud platform, if they want.

• Although Amazon AWS’ initial Braket announcement indicated support for the D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti platforms, one additional statement included in the announcement is that they are expecting to announce additional partners soon.  Their strategy is to develop cross-platform developer tools so that an end user can program using Amazon’s front end can switch between hardware platforms relatively easy. How they intend on doing this will be interesting because each of those platforms are quite different.  There are still a lot of details not yet available about AWS’ Braket offering including pricing, software, and additional details on IonQ’s hardware.  We expect to hear more about these in 2020.

• Microsoft also announced that their Azure cloud platform will partner with Honeywell, IonQ, and QCI.  Their software front end will be the established Q# programming language and the Quantum Development Kit. Like the AWS announcement a lot of details are still not available including pricing and details on the hardware and we expect to hear more in 2020.  Microsoft also announced that they will eventually hook up their topological based quantum computer to the Azure platform, but we think achieving this in 2020 may be a stretch.

• IBM has been the most aggressive cloud platform vendor in establishing a dedicated quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, New York. As of September they had 10 machines quantum machines available on the cloud and were in the process of adding four more.  And this does not include their recent announcements to install additional IBM Q System One machines in both Germany and Japan nor does it include any machines that are using for internal research and development.  IBM may also opt to provide support for an alternate hardware platform to provide their users a means to compare different technologies.  IBM recently announced that their QISKIT software platform now also supports AQT’s ion trap technology and that it only took one week’s work to implement this.  We expect that other hardware technologies could be easily supported in QISKIT if IBM chooses to do so. There is also an open source module called Forest backend for QISKIT, but we are not sure if IBM is ready to support another superconducting quantum computer.

• We may see in 2020 even more cloud vendors jump in to provide some form of quantum cloud service. This could include both classical cloud vendors who don’t want AWS and Azure to get too far ahead of them as well as some of the emerging hardware companies that desire to set up their own cloud service. Also, some application software companies that want to act as resellers and bundle their own application level software with one of the hardware platforms and market both together as a package.

Application Software

In 2019 we saw a bunch of new software startups that are focusing on specific applications and offering their services to end users and we expect this trend to continue in 2020.  The focus so far has been working on proof-of-concept applications so that the end users, as well as the startup quantum software companies, can identify specific real world problems and solutions that will prove to be commercially useful when the larger machines are available. We do expect to see significant development in 2020 in new application libraries, continued enhancements to many of the open source development platforms and improved performance in simulators. For the gate-based machines, we do not expect to see more than a handful of applications, at best, start being used in a production mode in 2020.  In fact, some quantum researchers are not sure there will any significant number of production applications in the NISQ era. They argue that this will not occur until the larger error corrected machines are available later this decade.

D-Wave has been working with end users for several years now and over 200 early applications have been developed for their quantum annealing machine.  Many of these are proof-of-concept applications that aren’t meant for daily production such as the recent Volkswagen experiment to optimize bus route optimization during the recent Web Summit conference in Lisbon.  Because D-Wave started earlier, has a more focused set of potential applications and a larger number of available qubits (even though the qubit quality levels may not be as high as the gate level machines), we do expect in 2020 to see a handful of these early applications being using on a production basis for commercial use.   So on the very important measure of using a quantum computer for commercial use we do expect that D-Wave to beat out the gate level machines, at least in 2020.

Optimizing Compilers (aka Transpilers) and Qubit Control Firmware

Perhaps not as widely appreciated is the importance of the backend compiler and qubit control firmware that translates the application program that user might develop to the specific electronic signals that control the operation of the qubits. The goal is to execute the user’s program in a way that minimizes qubit and gate count, minimizes circuit depth, and provides the best accuracy for the overall solution.  This is accomplished by rearranging the gates that an end user may initially input into something equivalent, but more efficient, as well as optimizing the microwave or laser pulses that control the individual qubits.

This software can become enormously complex but is critical to optimizing the performance of the hardware. Google has indicated that they would have been challenged to successfully complete their Quantum Supremacy experience without the use of this software. Leaders in this area include Q-CTRL and Quantum Benchmark, and we have also heard good words about Cambridge Quantum Computing’s (CQC) optimizing compiler for the IBM machines which they claim to be superior to the ones provided by IBM in QISKIT.

We expect to see significant developments in this area in 2020.  In December, IBM made one of their machines available for external researcher to experiment with pulse level controls of the hardware.  Our belief is that a lot of work still needs to be done in this area with a lot of opportunity to make great strides in this area in 2020.

Wish List

There a few things we would like to see happen in 2020 that would benefit the QC industry overall, but we are not sure how much progress will be made on these in the coming year. Nonetheless, we will list them here to help promote advancements in these areas.

• Quantum computing nomenclature should be standardized so everyone uses the same terminology.  Unfortunately, we see differences in how the same thing is described by different people and this can be quite confusing to a newcomer. (For example, try viewing a collection of different images of a Bloch sphere and you will notice that some versions have switched the positions of the X and Y axes.)
• We would like to see a standardized hardware agnostic programming language for gate level machines with an associated requirement that all higher level software platforms be able to both import and export programs to and from this language.  This would encourage interoperability and make it much easier to convert a program from one platform to another.
• With all the new machines coming on-line in 2020 there will be a lot questions about performance benchmarking to compare the different machines.  Although IBM has developed their Quantum Volume metric, it is not clear how widely this is supported within the rest of the industry.  We’d like to see a standardized benchmark, analogous to LINPACK for supercomputers, that everyone can agree upon to characterize the performance of the quantum computers.

Non-Technical Factors

There are other non-technical factors that we expect to hear more about in 2020.  There is a continuing concern that we are not developing a quantum trained workforce as fast as we should. Steps are being taken to improve education and training programs but it is not clear that these are enough. Another factor we see is the growing tension between researchers and government officials over export and visa controls. The researchers are concerned with hampering overall progress in QC research if information cannot flow freely, while the government officials are concerned with maintaining their country’s control over the technology so that it is not use unfairly by a country’s adversary.

Finally, there is always talk of a quantum winter.  We don’t see that in 2020 as many of the government funding programs that we have reported on will start to kick in.  In addition, there will be continued investment in the private sector, particularly from the large classical computing companies that don’t want to miss out. On a positive note, a few of the smaller software startups have already told us they expect to be profitable in 2020.

Summary

So we expect that 2020 will be another exciting year for the quantum community with a lot of progress being made. Many of the developments will be extrapolations of things we saw in 2019, but we also expect a few surprises where new technologies or new players come in and provide something new that we did not expect. Still the developments in 2020 will represent continued progress in a technology that will require several decades to reach its full potential. 

We wish everyone working in this area the best of success and look forward to reporting on your developments as the year progresses.

December 30, 2019

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Quantum Computing Outlook for 2020

The year 2019 was a busy year in the quantum community with a lot of new developments and announcements.  We are sure that 2020 will be just as busy, if not more so, and expect continued advances.  We have seen some of the roadmaps that folks in the industry have discussed so with our intrepid 20/20 vision (pardon the pun!) we will describe some of the developments that we expect to see this year.

Hardware

Hardware providers will continue to make advances in both qubit count, qubit quality and new technologies in 2020.  Things we expect to see include:

• In September 2018, Rigetti announced a new architecture they call Aspen starting with a 16 qubit chip, advancing to an intermediate density of 32 or 64 qubits with a large version of 128 qubits in their roadmap.  In December they announced their 32 qubit version, called Aspen-7, which will run on both Rigetti’s QCS as well as Amazon’s Braket cloud services.  In 2020, we expect that they will announce availability of the 128 qubit version on these services too.

• In October 2019, Google announced that they successfully completed their quantum supremacy experiment with their 53 qubit Sycamore chip.  Since then they have hinted at various industry conferences that they are working on a 57+ qubit version of this chip with some improved qubit quality metrics.  We think the reason for the “+” is that the chip may have 59 or 60 qubits in the design, but a few might not work due to mechanical or yield failures.  However, they have indicated that a large focus of their 2020 activity will be to improve the gate fidelities.  In particular, their current Sycamore had an average 0.62% two-qubit simultaneous gate error and they would like to get that down to 0.1%.

• IBM has publicly declared their intention to double what they call Quantum Volume every year.  Qubit Volume is a metric that can provide a general description of a machines power that takes into account the number of qubits, the quality of the qubits and other factors.  When they announced their 20 qubit IBM Q System One in 2019 they indicated that they had achieved a Quantum Volume factor of 16 with the design.  In September 2019, they announced a 53 qubit machine, but have not yet announced an associated Quantum Volume metric for it. We suspect they are still calibrating it and tuning it up for peak performance and they are waiting until this is done before announcing a quantum volume.  In any case, we do expect them to hit a goal of a doubling of Quantum Volume to 32 in 2020 either with this 53 qubit machine or perhaps something else they may have in development.

• Another new superconducting entrant in 2020 will be Quantum Circuits Inc. (QCI).  They have announced a partnership with Microsoft that will serve as their cloud provider.  Not many details are public about their quantum computer, but we expect to hear more in the coming year.

• 2020 should be a big year for D-Wave with the production release of their 5000+ qubit Advantage architecture based upon their Pegasus chip.  This architecture should bring substantial improvements in performance due to the increase number of qubits,improved coherence times, and better qubit connectivity.

  We are aware that D-Wave is working on a technology called nonstoquastic Hamiltonian which allows qubits to be coupled with two degrees of freedom rather than the current one degree of freedom.  This technology can substantially improve the problem solving capability of the quantum annealing machines.  Although we do not expect this to be included initial in the 2020 Advantage machines, we would expect them to announce a roadmap indicating that this technology will be incorporated in follow-on machines in the 2021-2022 time frame.

• 2020 will see the first public availability of several cloud based ion trap machines from IonQ, Honeywell, and Alpine Quantum Technologies (AQT).  IonQ and Honeywell will be partnering with Microsoft and AWS to provide cloud access, but it is not yet known if they will also offer their own cloud services. AQT has some interesting possibilities because their ion trap hardware is now programmable via both Google’s Cirq as well as IBM’s Qiskit (see below).

• We also expect to see cloud availability of photonic technologies from Xanadu.  They use a different type of element called qumodes rather than qubits.  Qumodes are continuously variable elements and may have some advantages for certain computations.  Xanadu current has a 12 qumode machine in the lab and expect to be offering one with 50+ qumodes by the end of 2020. Another distinguishing feature of photonic technologies is that they do not require the expensive dilution refrigerators that are needed by the other technologies.

• Another new technology introduction that we expect to see in 2020 is the first cloud based computer based upon spin qubit technology.  QuTech is working on a project called Quantum Inspire and we expect them to announce in 2020 cloud availability of a small quantum machine based on their spin qubit technology.

• Many other players are working on hardware technologies, but we are not certain how many will be announced in 2020.  These include Alibaba (superconducting), Atom Computing (neutral atoms), ColdQuanta (cold atoms), Eeroq (cold atoms), PsiQuantum (photonic), Intel (spin qubits), IQM (superconducting), Microsoft (topological), Silicon Quantum Computing (spin qubits) and several others.  Although we believe most of these efforts will still be in development in 2020, we would not be surprised if one or two announce public availability before the year is out.

Cloud Services

The end of 2019 saw significant announcements from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to provide cloud services for multiple different hardware platforms. We expect to see several additional cloud services announcements in 2020 and we expect to see more of these multi-platform arrangements where a cloud service will support several different hardware platforms including:

• We expect Google to take steps in 2020 to make their machine more available on the cloud.  Google has their own Google Cloud Services group so we expect them to leverage those capabilities and compete with Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon AWS Braket services.  In addition, we note that AQT has also announced it is compatible with Google’s Cirq software so this might provide an alternate platform for Google to support in a cloud platform, if they want.

• Although Amazon AWS’ initial Braket announcement indicated support for the D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti platforms, one additional statement included in the announcement is that they are expecting to announce additional partners soon.  Their strategy is to develop cross-platform developer tools so that an end user can program using Amazon’s front end can switch between hardware platforms relatively easy. How they intend on doing this will be interesting because each of those platforms are quite different.  There are still a lot of details not yet available about AWS’ Braket offering including pricing, software, and additional details on IonQ’s hardware.  We expect to hear more about these in 2020.

• Microsoft also announced that their Azure cloud platform will partner with Honeywell, IonQ, and QCI.  Their software front end will be the established Q# programming language and the Quantum Development Kit. Like the AWS announcement a lot of details are still not available including pricing and details on the hardware and we expect to hear more in 2020.  Microsoft also announced that they will eventually hook up their topological based quantum computer to the Azure platform, but we think achieving this in 2020 may be a stretch.

• IBM has been the most aggressive cloud platform vendor in establishing a dedicated quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, New York. As of September they had 10 machines quantum machines available on the cloud and were in the process of adding four more.  And this does not include their recent announcements to install additional IBM Q System One machines in both Germany and Japan nor does it include any machines that are using for internal research and development.  IBM may also opt to provide support for an alternate hardware platform to provide their users a means to compare different technologies.  IBM recently announced that their QISKIT software platform now also supports AQT’s ion trap technology and that it only took one week’s work to implement this.  We expect that other hardware technologies could be easily supported in QISKIT if IBM chooses to do so. There is also an open source module called Forest backend for QISKIT, but we are not sure if IBM is ready to support another superconducting quantum computer.

• We may see in 2020 even more cloud vendors jump in to provide some form of quantum cloud service. This could include both classical cloud vendors who don’t want AWS and Azure to get too far ahead of them as well as some of the emerging hardware companies that desire to set up their own cloud service. Also, some application software companies that want to act as resellers and bundle their own application level software with one of the hardware platforms and market both together as a package.

Application Software

In 2019 we saw a bunch of new software startups that are focusing on specific applications and offering their services to end users and we expect this trend to continue in 2020.  The focus so far has been working on proof-of-concept applications so that the end users, as well as the startup quantum software companies, can identify specific real world problems and solutions that will prove to be commercially useful when the larger machines are available. We do expect to see significant development in 2020 in new application libraries, continued enhancements to many of the open source development platforms and improved performance in simulators. For the gate-based machines, we do not expect to see more than a handful of applications, at best, start being used in a production mode in 2020.  In fact, some quantum researchers are not sure there will any significant number of production applications in the NISQ era. They argue that this will not occur until the larger error corrected machines are available later this decade.

D-Wave has been working with end users for several years now and over 200 early applications have been developed for their quantum annealing machine.  Many of these are proof-of-concept applications that aren’t meant for daily production such as the recent Volkswagen experiment to optimize bus route optimization during the recent Web Summit conference in Lisbon.  Because D-Wave started earlier, has a more focused set of potential applications and a larger number of available qubits (even though the qubit quality levels may not be as high as the gate level machines), we do expect in 2020 to see a handful of these early applications being using on a production basis for commercial use.   So on the very important measure of using a quantum computer for commercial use we do expect that D-Wave to beat out the gate level machines, at least in 2020.

Optimizing Compilers (aka Transpilers) and Qubit Control Firmware

Perhaps not as widely appreciated is the importance of the backend compiler and qubit control firmware that translates the application program that user might develop to the specific electronic signals that control the operation of the qubits. The goal is to execute the user’s program in a way that minimizes qubit and gate count, minimizes circuit depth, and provides the best accuracy for the overall solution.  This is accomplished by rearranging the gates that an end user may initially input into something equivalent, but more efficient, as well as optimizing the microwave or laser pulses that control the individual qubits.

This software can become enormously complex but is critical to optimizing the performance of the hardware. Google has indicated that they would have been challenged to successfully complete their Quantum Supremacy experience without the use of this software. Leaders in this area include Q-CTRL and Quantum Benchmark, and we have also heard good words about Cambridge Quantum Computing’s (CQC) optimizing compiler for the IBM machines which they claim to be superior to the ones provided by IBM in QISKIT.

We expect to see significant developments in this area in 2020.  In December, IBM made one of their machines available for external researcher to experiment with pulse level controls of the hardware.  Our belief is that a lot of work still needs to be done in this area with a lot of opportunity to make great strides in this area in 2020.

Wish List

There a few things we would like to see happen in 2020 that would benefit the QC industry overall, but we are not sure how much progress will be made on these in the coming year. Nonetheless, we will list them here to help promote advancements in these areas.

• Quantum computing nomenclature should be standardized so everyone uses the same terminology.  Unfortunately, we see differences in how the same thing is described by different people and this can be quite confusing to a newcomer. (For example, try viewing a collection of different images of a Bloch sphere and you will notice that some versions have switched the positions of the X and Y axes.)
• We would like to see a standardized hardware agnostic programming language for gate level machines with an associated requirement that all higher level software platforms be able to both import and export programs to and from this language.  This would encourage interoperability and make it much easier to convert a program from one platform to another.
• With all the new machines coming on-line in 2020 there will be a lot questions about performance benchmarking to compare the different machines.  Although IBM has developed their Quantum Volume metric, it is not clear how widely this is supported within the rest of the industry.  We’d like to see a standardized benchmark, analogous to LINPACK for supercomputers, that everyone can agree upon to characterize the performance of the quantum computers.

Non-Technical Factors

There are other non-technical factors that we expect to hear more about in 2020.  There is a continuing concern that we are not developing a quantum trained workforce as fast as we should. Steps are being taken to improve education and training programs but it is not clear that these are enough. Another factor we see is the growing tension between researchers and government officials over export and visa controls. The researchers are concerned with hampering overall progress in QC research if information cannot flow freely, while the government officials are concerned with maintaining their country’s control over the technology so that it is not use unfairly by a country’s adversary.

Finally, there is always talk of a quantum winter.  We don’t see that in 2020 as many of the government funding programs that we have reported on will start to kick in.  In addition, there will be continued investment in the private sector, particularly from the large classical computing companies that don’t want to miss out. On a positive note, a few of the smaller software startups have already told us they expect to be profitable in 2020.

Summary

So we expect that 2020 will be another exciting year for the quantum community with a lot of progress being made. Many of the developments will be extrapolations of things we saw in 2019, but we also expect a few surprises where new technologies or new players come in and provide something new that we did not expect. Still the developments in 2020 will represent continued progress in a technology that will require several decades to reach its full potential. 

We wish everyone working in this area the best of success and look forward to reporting on your developments as the year progresses.

December 30, 2019

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Quantum Computing Outlook for 2020

The year 2019 was a busy year in the quantum community with a lot of new developments and announcements.  We are sure that 2020 will be just as busy, if not more so, and expect continued advances.  We have seen some of the roadmaps that folks in the industry have discussed so with our intrepid 20/20 vision (pardon the pun!) we will describe some of the developments that we expect to see this year.

Hardware

Hardware providers will continue to make advances in both qubit count, qubit quality and new technologies in 2020.  Things we expect to see include:

• In September 2018, Rigetti announced a new architecture they call Aspen starting with a 16 qubit chip, advancing to an intermediate density of 32 or 64 qubits with a large version of 128 qubits in their roadmap.  In December they announced their 32 qubit version, called Aspen-7, which will run on both Rigetti’s QCS as well as Amazon’s Braket cloud services.  In 2020, we expect that they will announce availability of the 128 qubit version on these services too.

• In October 2019, Google announced that they successfully completed their quantum supremacy experiment with their 53 qubit Sycamore chip.  Since then they have hinted at various industry conferences that they are working on a 57+ qubit version of this chip with some improved qubit quality metrics.  We think the reason for the “+” is that the chip may have 59 or 60 qubits in the design, but a few might not work due to mechanical or yield failures.  However, they have indicated that a large focus of their 2020 activity will be to improve the gate fidelities.  In particular, their current Sycamore had an average 0.62% two-qubit simultaneous gate error and they would like to get that down to 0.1%.

• IBM has publicly declared their intention to double what they call Quantum Volume every year.  Qubit Volume is a metric that can provide a general description of a machines power that takes into account the number of qubits, the quality of the qubits and other factors.  When they announced their 20 qubit IBM Q System One in 2019 they indicated that they had achieved a Quantum Volume factor of 16 with the design.  In September 2019, they announced a 53 qubit machine, but have not yet announced an associated Quantum Volume metric for it. We suspect they are still calibrating it and tuning it up for peak performance and they are waiting until this is done before announcing a quantum volume.  In any case, we do expect them to hit a goal of a doubling of Quantum Volume to 32 in 2020 either with this 53 qubit machine or perhaps something else they may have in development.

• Another new superconducting entrant in 2020 will be Quantum Circuits Inc. (QCI).  They have announced a partnership with Microsoft that will serve as their cloud provider.  Not many details are public about their quantum computer, but we expect to hear more in the coming year.

• 2020 should be a big year for D-Wave with the production release of their 5000+ qubit Advantage architecture based upon their Pegasus chip.  This architecture should bring substantial improvements in performance due to the increase number of qubits,improved coherence times, and better qubit connectivity.

  We are aware that D-Wave is working on a technology called nonstoquastic Hamiltonian which allows qubits to be coupled with two degrees of freedom rather than the current one degree of freedom.  This technology can substantially improve the problem solving capability of the quantum annealing machines.  Although we do not expect this to be included initial in the 2020 Advantage machines, we would expect them to announce a roadmap indicating that this technology will be incorporated in follow-on machines in the 2021-2022 time frame.

• 2020 will see the first public availability of several cloud based ion trap machines from IonQ, Honeywell, and Alpine Quantum Technologies (AQT).  IonQ and Honeywell will be partnering with Microsoft and AWS to provide cloud access, but it is not yet known if they will also offer their own cloud services. AQT has some interesting possibilities because their ion trap hardware is now programmable via both Google’s Cirq as well as IBM’s Qiskit (see below).

• We also expect to see cloud availability of photonic technologies from Xanadu.  They use a different type of element called qumodes rather than qubits.  Qumodes are continuously variable elements and may have some advantages for certain computations.  Xanadu current has a 12 qumode machine in the lab and expect to be offering one with 50+ qumodes by the end of 2020. Another distinguishing feature of photonic technologies is that they do not require the expensive dilution refrigerators that are needed by the other technologies.

• Another new technology introduction that we expect to see in 2020 is the first cloud based computer based upon spin qubit technology.  QuTech is working on a project called Quantum Inspire and we expect them to announce in 2020 cloud availability of a small quantum machine based on their spin qubit technology.

• Many other players are working on hardware technologies, but we are not certain how many will be announced in 2020.  These include Alibaba (superconducting), Atom Computing (neutral atoms), ColdQuanta (cold atoms), Eeroq (cold atoms), PsiQuantum (photonic), Intel (spin qubits), IQM (superconducting), Microsoft (topological), Silicon Quantum Computing (spin qubits) and several others.  Although we believe most of these efforts will still be in development in 2020, we would not be surprised if one or two announce public availability before the year is out.

Cloud Services

The end of 2019 saw significant announcements from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to provide cloud services for multiple different hardware platforms. We expect to see several additional cloud services announcements in 2020 and we expect to see more of these multi-platform arrangements where a cloud service will support several different hardware platforms including:

• We expect Google to take steps in 2020 to make their machine more available on the cloud.  Google has their own Google Cloud Services group so we expect them to leverage those capabilities and compete with Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon AWS Braket services.  In addition, we note that AQT has also announced it is compatible with Google’s Cirq software so this might provide an alternate platform for Google to support in a cloud platform, if they want.

• Although Amazon AWS’ initial Braket announcement indicated support for the D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti platforms, one additional statement included in the announcement is that they are expecting to announce additional partners soon.  Their strategy is to develop cross-platform developer tools so that an end user can program using Amazon’s front end can switch between hardware platforms relatively easy. How they intend on doing this will be interesting because each of those platforms are quite different.  There are still a lot of details not yet available about AWS’ Braket offering including pricing, software, and additional details on IonQ’s hardware.  We expect to hear more about these in 2020.

• Microsoft also announced that their Azure cloud platform will partner with Honeywell, IonQ, and QCI.  Their software front end will be the established Q# programming language and the Quantum Development Kit. Like the AWS announcement a lot of details are still not available including pricing and details on the hardware and we expect to hear more in 2020.  Microsoft also announced that they will eventually hook up their topological based quantum computer to the Azure platform, but we think achieving this in 2020 may be a stretch.

• IBM has been the most aggressive cloud platform vendor in establishing a dedicated quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, New York. As of September they had 10 machines quantum machines available on the cloud and were in the process of adding four more.  And this does not include their recent announcements to install additional IBM Q System One machines in both Germany and Japan nor does it include any machines that are using for internal research and development.  IBM may also opt to provide support for an alternate hardware platform to provide their users a means to compare different technologies.  IBM recently announced that their QISKIT software platform now also supports AQT’s ion trap technology and that it only took one week’s work to implement this.  We expect that other hardware technologies could be easily supported in QISKIT if IBM chooses to do so. There is also an open source module called Forest backend for QISKIT, but we are not sure if IBM is ready to support another superconducting quantum computer.

• We may see in 2020 even more cloud vendors jump in to provide some form of quantum cloud service. This could include both classical cloud vendors who don’t want AWS and Azure to get too far ahead of them as well as some of the emerging hardware companies that desire to set up their own cloud service. Also, some application software companies that want to act as resellers and bundle their own application level software with one of the hardware platforms and market both together as a package.

Application Software

In 2019 we saw a bunch of new software startups that are focusing on specific applications and offering their services to end users and we expect this trend to continue in 2020.  The focus so far has been working on proof-of-concept applications so that the end users, as well as the startup quantum software companies, can identify specific real world problems and solutions that will prove to be commercially useful when the larger machines are available. We do expect to see significant development in 2020 in new application libraries, continued enhancements to many of the open source development platforms and improved performance in simulators. For the gate-based machines, we do not expect to see more than a handful of applications, at best, start being used in a production mode in 2020.  In fact, some quantum researchers are not sure there will any significant number of production applications in the NISQ era. They argue that this will not occur until the larger error corrected machines are available later this decade.

D-Wave has been working with end users for several years now and over 200 early applications have been developed for their quantum annealing machine.  Many of these are proof-of-concept applications that aren’t meant for daily production such as the recent Volkswagen experiment to optimize bus route optimization during the recent Web Summit conference in Lisbon.  Because D-Wave started earlier, has a more focused set of potential applications and a larger number of available qubits (even though the qubit quality levels may not be as high as the gate level machines), we do expect in 2020 to see a handful of these early applications being using on a production basis for commercial use.   So on the very important measure of using a quantum computer for commercial use we do expect that D-Wave to beat out the gate level machines, at least in 2020.

Optimizing Compilers (aka Transpilers) and Qubit Control Firmware

Perhaps not as widely appreciated is the importance of the backend compiler and qubit control firmware that translates the application program that user might develop to the specific electronic signals that control the operation of the qubits. The goal is to execute the user’s program in a way that minimizes qubit and gate count, minimizes circuit depth, and provides the best accuracy for the overall solution.  This is accomplished by rearranging the gates that an end user may initially input into something equivalent, but more efficient, as well as optimizing the microwave or laser pulses that control the individual qubits.

This software can become enormously complex but is critical to optimizing the performance of the hardware. Google has indicated that they would have been challenged to successfully complete their Quantum Supremacy experience without the use of this software. Leaders in this area include Q-CTRL and Quantum Benchmark, and we have also heard good words about Cambridge Quantum Computing’s (CQC) optimizing compiler for the IBM machines which they claim to be superior to the ones provided by IBM in QISKIT.

We expect to see significant developments in this area in 2020.  In December, IBM made one of their machines available for external researcher to experiment with pulse level controls of the hardware.  Our belief is that a lot of work still needs to be done in this area with a lot of opportunity to make great strides in this area in 2020.

Wish List

There a few things we would like to see happen in 2020 that would benefit the QC industry overall, but we are not sure how much progress will be made on these in the coming year. Nonetheless, we will list them here to help promote advancements in these areas.

• Quantum computing nomenclature should be standardized so everyone uses the same terminology.  Unfortunately, we see differences in how the same thing is described by different people and this can be quite confusing to a newcomer. (For example, try viewing a collection of different images of a Bloch sphere and you will notice that some versions have switched the positions of the X and Y axes.)
• We would like to see a standardized hardware agnostic programming language for gate level machines with an associated requirement that all higher level software platforms be able to both import and export programs to and from this language.  This would encourage interoperability and make it much easier to convert a program from one platform to another.
• With all the new machines coming on-line in 2020 there will be a lot questions about performance benchmarking to compare the different machines.  Although IBM has developed their Quantum Volume metric, it is not clear how widely this is supported within the rest of the industry.  We’d like to see a standardized benchmark, analogous to LINPACK for supercomputers, that everyone can agree upon to characterize the performance of the quantum computers.

Non-Technical Factors

There are other non-technical factors that we expect to hear more about in 2020.  There is a continuing concern that we are not developing a quantum trained workforce as fast as we should. Steps are being taken to improve education and training programs but it is not clear that these are enough. Another factor we see is the growing tension between researchers and government officials over export and visa controls. The researchers are concerned with hampering overall progress in QC research if information cannot flow freely, while the government officials are concerned with maintaining their country’s control over the technology so that it is not use unfairly by a country’s adversary.

Finally, there is always talk of a quantum winter.  We don’t see that in 2020 as many of the government funding programs that we have reported on will start to kick in.  In addition, there will be continued investment in the private sector, particularly from the large classical computing companies that don’t want to miss out. On a positive note, a few of the smaller software startups have already told us they expect to be profitable in 2020.

Summary

So we expect that 2020 will be another exciting year for the quantum community with a lot of progress being made. Many of the developments will be extrapolations of things we saw in 2019, but we also expect a few surprises where new technologies or new players come in and provide something new that we did not expect. Still the developments in 2020 will represent continued progress in a technology that will require several decades to reach its full potential. 

We wish everyone working in this area the best of success and look forward to reporting on your developments as the year progresses.

December 30, 2019

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U.S. Government Soliciting Proposals for Quantum Characterization of Intermediate Scale Systems

In a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO) in association with the National Security Agency (NSA) are soliciting proposals to research efficient and practical protocols and techniques that allow Quantum Characterization, Verification, and Validation (QCVV) of larger systems with direct relevance to Fault Tolerant Quantum Computing (FTQC), and to demonstrate these protocols on intermediate-scale systems 10-20 qubits in size. Much of the previous work performed to characterize quantum qubits has been performed using one and two qubit measurements such as the qubit fidelity measurements that we show on our Qubit Quality page. However, as systems get larger with an eye towards building fault tolerant machines the number of measurements to fully characterize a system using these previous approaches would grow exponentially.  It would be helpful to develop ways of evaluating these machines by selectively characterizing only the subset of information relevant to FTQC.  The purpose of this program will be to research proposals and techniques to achieve this.

The BAA is requesting proposals in two categories.  The first is for integrating theoretical and experimental research to identify and address the challenges of QCVV for intermediate-scale quantum systems. The second is for theoretical research that may significantly advance QCVV through novel approaches.  The agencies expect to make multiple awards with a maximum of $1.5M per year for each Category 1 awards, $700K per year for each Category 2 awards and $400K per year for each Category 2 awards that are theory only. The program and awards are expected to run for a four year period.

The BAA is available for Institutions of higher education (foreign and domestic), nonprofit organizations, and for-profit concerns (large and small businesses). Those interested in applying are encouraged to submit white papers by January 28, 2020 with a final proposal due by March 17, 2020.

For those interested in reading the full BAA, you can find a summary along with a link to download the full PDF file on the government’s contract opportunity site here.

December 20, 2019

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Japan-IBM Partnership Formed; IBM Q System One to Be Installed in Japan

IBM and the University of Tokyo have announced a partnership to encourage and promote quantum computing research in Japan. This partnership is similar to one they established with Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Germany last September. Key elements of the program include:

• IBM will install an IBM Q System One at an IBM facility in Japan. This will be IBM’s first quantum computer installation in Asia and only the second outside of the United States. It will provide students and researchers in Japan with the hands-on opportunity to explore quantum algorithms, applications and software and develop practical applications of quantum computing.
• IBM and the University of Tokyo will set up a quantum system technology center for development of components and technologies, such as advanced cryogenic and microwave test capabilities, for next generation quantum computers.
• IBM’s Japan quantum hub which they previously established with Keio University will be expanded to encourage more companies to join and explore the benefits of quantum computing in a variety of industries including finance, chemistry and materials, pharma, automotive manufacturing and logistics.

For more information on this announcement, you can read IBM’s press release here and a related IBM Research blog posting here.

December 19, 2019

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Observations from the 2019 Q2B Conference

I recently attended the third annual Q2B Conference on December 10-12, 2019 in San Jose, California.  The Q2B conference continues to grow and had about 540 attendees representing many different quantum hardware/software companies, end users, universities, government agencies, and venture capital communities. This number is double the attendance of the first Q2B conference in 2017.

This report is not a comprehensive listing of everything that went on at the conference.  There were several sessions that occurred in parallel and I needed to choose which ones to attend.  In addition, there were several sessions that covered topics that were similar to items covered in other conferences, published technical papers or previous Q2B events.  So I will only cover those items that I found new, interesting and relevant.  My apologies in advance to those folks who wanted to know about things that I do not cover here.  However, QC Ware did record videos of all the presentations and will be posting most of the videos and presentations from the conference within the next month or two.

Google
John Martinis presented the Sycamore chip and the previously published results of the Quantum Supremacy experiment.  But the most interesting part of his talk was when he mentioned that they have already fabricated an improved version of the Sycamore chip and were currently testing it. Although he didn’t disclose full details of the chip, he did hint that the number of qubits have been increased from 53 to 57+.  Also, this new device should have even better performance than Sycamore with a particular mention of improved readout fidelity.

IBM
Anthony Annunziata discussed the IBM Q systems and the IBM Q Network. They current have a total of 15 systems available in the cloud. The most interesting thing for us in this presentation was the announcement that they were opening up access to the OpenPulse API for people who want to research how to control the pulses that perform the actual control of the qubits. This will require newly released version 0.14 of Qiskit but will allow people to control the pulses over the cloud for the first time.  More about this can be found in a newly released IBM quantum computing blog entry titled Get to the heart of real quantum hardware.

Microsoft
The most significant thing to us at Q2B was not the presentation itself, but the display in a glass case at their booth of a new cryo-CMOS control chip.  The chip would be able to potentially control up to 50,000 qubits with just three wires that come in from outside the fridge. We recently posted a news article describing this chip in more detail and you can find the article here.

Honeywell
Honeywell has been in stealth mode with their ion trap technology development, but they pulled the curtains open slightly with a presentation by Tony Uttley. Although he didn’t mention too many of the technical details of their machines, he did mention three advantages that they have including long coherence time qubits, high resolutions for qubit rotations, and the ability to take a measurement on a single qubit and do conditional executions based upon the result  (a quantum IF statement, if you will). This capability is enabled by the long coherence times of the ion traps and their ability to take the measurement on one qubit while keeping all the others in their quantum state. Although we will need to see the details of this when Honeywell has the broad commercial launch of their machines in the Spring of 2020 to fully understand how it works, we are not aware of any of the other quantum platforms currently having this capability. Later on, in a software session, one of their researchers Mike Foss-Feig presented a paper titled “Solving large problems with small quantum computers” that appears to utilize this capability.

Rigetti
Chad Rigetti discussed their 32-qubit Aspen-7 processor and their newly announced relationship with Amazon Web Services.  We had previously covered this in a news article published earlier this month which you can see here. However, in his presentation he disclosed for the first time that they had implemented a new and additional family of parameterized two-qubit gates in their architecture called the XY(θ) gate.  And when the value of θ is equal to 𝜋, this will implement the iSWAP gate. The importance of having a richer set of gates available is that it allows a reduction in circuit depth which will reduce errors and improve solution quality. In a newly released blog paper, a Rigetti engineer indicated that this could provide an average gate depth reduction of 32% for a possible random circuit. For those of us coming from a classical computer background, this is somewhat like adding a new instruction to a microprocessor’s instruction set that allows one to collapse a multi-instruction sequence down to one. Details of this new family of two qubits gates can be found in a Rigetti blog entry here and a technical paper posted on arXiv here.

Xanadu
Xanadu is working in both the software and hardware areas.  In the software area they have been working on several quantum readiness projects using their Strawberry Fields and PennyLane software. PennyLane can work with several different quantum hardware platforms and machine learning libraries. Not just their own. Zach Vernon presented the Xanadu hardware technology based upon Gaussian Boson Sampling (GBS) which utilizes a continuously variable unit called a qumode instead of a qubit.  Zach mentioned that Xanadu currently has a 12 qumode system running in their lab with a goal of having a system with 50+ qumodes available by the end of 2020.

Horizon Quantum Computing
Joe Fitzsimons of Horizon Quantum Computing presented a new and unique software approach and working to provide a means of compiling classical code for quantum processors. The company is creating a new programming language called Carbon which is intended to be a subset of the classical Octave/Matlab programming languages for numerical programming.  The intent is to provide a capability for classical numerical programmers to convert their programs into something which can run on a quantum computer without requiring the programmer to understand the intricacies of how the quantum computers work.  Their software will transform an application program through four levels of software abstraction until it reaches the lowest level which would then be able to work on a gate level machine.  Horizon’s software is still in development but should present some very interesting possibilities when it is released.

December 14, 2019

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D-Wave Announces New CEO and Signs Agreements with NEC

D-Wave is finishing the year with a pair of announcements. First, it indicated that CEO Vern Brownell will be retiring at the end of the year and that current chief product officer and executive vice president of research and development Alan Baratz will take over as CEO. Baratz joined D-Wave in 2017 and has overseen many of the recent developments including launch of the Leap™ Cloud Service as well as the development of D-Wave’s next-generation Advantage™ quantum system. At this time, we are not expecting any significant changes in D-Wave’s strategy due to this management change.

The agreements with NEC will include several areas of activity. NEC will be able to act as an authorized reseller of D-Wave’s Leap cloud service, they will jointly work with D-Wave to provide applications support and development for customers in Japan, and finally, the two companies will jointly develop hybrid services that combine the power of NEC’s supercomputers and other classical systems with D-Wave’s quantum technology including D-Wave Hybrid™, an open-source workflow platform for building and running quantum-classical hybrid applications. NEC will also be making a financial investment of $10 million into D-Wave and this is expected to close shortly.

For more, you can view the news release about the CEO change on the D-Wave web site here and the news release about the agreements with NEC here.

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How Many Years Until a Quantum Computer Can Break RSA-2048?

One of the most frequently asked questions about quantum computing relates to how long before a quantum computer can break a public key cryptography code such as RSA-2048. Most of the time, the response is a general answer of “perhaps 10 years or more”. We have tried to analyze this ourselves in an article titled Applying Moore’s Law to Quantum Qubits and estimated this could happen anywhere between the years 2028 and 2041 depending upon how much error correction is required.
But in October of 2019 a more structured analysis called the Quantum Threat Timeline was published by the Global Risk Institute in association with Dr. Michele Mosca and Dr. Marco Piani of quantum-safe cybersecurity company evolutionQ that we think deserves more attention. They surveyed a set of 22 thought leaders who are expert in many areas of quantum science and technology who come from both industry and academia and located in four different continents. The survey generated a wealth of data which you can view in the links we list below, but you can see a quick summary below of their opinions on just one of the questions from the survey in the chart below.

For those who want to dig into this further, you can view the introduction to the report on the Global Risk Institute’s web site here, you can download the Executive Summary here, and you can download the full report that shows who was surveyed, the questions that were asked, and the details of the answers here.

December 13, 2019

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Intel, Microsoft Disclose Cryo-CMOS Quantum Control Chips

If you want to better understand what some of the next developments needed to continue scaling up the size of quantum computers, you should look at the picture below.

Cabling in the Google Sycamore Processor (Credit: Google)

This design requires the routing of approximately 200 coaxial cables that start at room temperature (300 K degrees) and go down the dilution refrigerator to the qubit chip which operates at about 10 millikelvin.  The mechanical engineering challenges for such a design are quite significant.  In fact, Google mentioned at the recent Q2B conference that the reason the Sycamore is a 53 qubit processor instead of 54 is not due to a bad qubit, but rather the fact that one of the cables is broken! Now imagine trying to extend this design to 1000 qubits.  Besides the physical space challenges involved with routing thousands of wires, there are also the thermal as well as crosstalk/signal integrity issues that would arise. So a discrete cabling approach will no longer be viable and new approaches need to be developed.

So this is where cryo-CMOS control chips fit in and several recent announcements show progress in this area.  The first is a development from Intel called Horse Ridge. Horse Ridge is a highly integrated, mixed-signal SOC built with Intel’s 22nm FinFET technology designed specifically to control both the superconducting and spin qubit technologies that Intel is developing.  It currently runs at 4 Kelvin which is within the range of possible operation of spin qubits, but would require some routing of signals from that level to the 15 millikelvin level required for superconducting qubits.

Although Intel is not releasing full technical details on this chip yet, they did tell us they will be presenting it at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February 2020 in San Francisco.  At this time, the chip is intended for Intel’s internal use only and a picture of this chip on a test board is shown below.

Stefano Pellerano, principal engineer at Intel Labs, holds Horse Ridge. (Credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation)

The second disclosure has come from Microsoft’s team in Australia along with their collaborators at Purdue University.  They have developed a qubit control chip with over 100,000 transistors that operates at roughly the 100 millikelvin level.  It is implemented in a 28 nm fully depleted silion-on-insulator (FDSOI) technology and Microsoft is claiming this will allow them to control up to 50,000 qubits with just three wires. Microsoft has posted two technical papers describing this chip (links are posted at the end of this article) and the picture below shows how it was recently displayed it in a glass case at the Q2B Conference in San Jose.

Microsoft’s Cryo-CMOS Qubit Control Chip on a Test Board

Finally we should note that Google presented a paper earlier this year at ISSCC 2019 on “A 28nm Bulk-CMOS 4-to-8GHz <2mW Cryogenic Pulse Modulator for Scalable Quantum Computing”.  Although the Google chip was a prototype chip that appeared to only support one qubit, its operation temperature was 3 Kelvin will certainly be used to provide valuable information for development of larger chips.

References

If you want to see more details about the chips mentioned in this article, here are the links.

· Intel’s News Release on their Horse Ridge Chip
· Microsoft’s First Paper on their Cryo-CMOS Control Chip
· Microsoft’s Second Paper With Additional Information on Cryo-CMOS Control Interfaces
· Google’s Paper on their Cryogenic Pulse Modulator Prototype

December 13, 2019

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