Ten UK quantum pilot projects to boost commercialisation
The UK government has selected 10 projects to boost the commercialisation and adoption of quantum computing (QC) and quantum networking (QN) projects.
The winners of the Quantum Missions pilot competition run by Innovate UK will share £12m (€15m) for projects over the next 24 months. Global partners include Cisco, PsiQuantum, Toshiba, Rigetti and SEEQC alongside UK startups and universities.
“By 2035, the UK aims to have deployed the world’s most advanced quantum network at scale, pioneering the future quantum internet,” said Gary Cutts, Executive Director Digital and Technologies at Innovate UK. “This funding is designed to underpin that ambition and these innovative projects represent a leap forward on this journey – these are exciting and significant advances in the fields of Quantum Computing and Quantum Networks.”
The QEC readout testbed will use SEEQC’s scalable digital qubit readout chip integrated with Rigetti’s Novera QPU at the National Quantum Computing Centre to reach the UK’s one-million quantum operation(1M-QuOp) target by 2028. This will also scale to 1Tera QuOps by 2035.
SEEQC’s digital chips are based on Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) devices at the same temperature as the qubits. SEEQC will develop and test the technologies and supply chain systems needed to improve quantum efficiency, build scalable architectures and components and grow UK quantum expertise in the £2.7m project..
By swapping bulky, power-hungry electronics with digital chips, the SEEQC devices cut costs by up to 97% and reduce energy usage by as much as 100,000 times, and is being built to work, in whole or in part, across all leading qubit technologies.
The single-photon enhanced quantum optical network detector (SEQOND) with Redwave Labs, Covesion and Fraunhofer UK Research will develop and demonstrate a novel approach for quantum receivers, using up-conversion to achieve higher performance while maintaining low cost and provide a route to exploit quantum memories. This will be demonstrated on a commercial quantum network.
One of the challenges with trapped ion quantum computer architectures is creating a 2D array. The Q-TATA project led by pioneer Oxford Ionics with Bay Photonics and Riverlane will enable highly efficient routing in ion-trap systems with proven world-record gate fidelity to increase the speed in multi-qubit systems to up to 1,000,000 times.
QUDITS2 is led by Vector Photonics and is developing a hardware demonstrator platform to showcase the viability of quantum communication systems using qudits, units that can store and process information beyond 0s and 1s.
Following on from the successful Innovate UK funded QUDITS feasibility study, the consortium includes Sheffield sensor startup Phlux Technology, the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult and the University of Bristol to develop a demonstrator using commercially available novel photonics technologies from the UK supply chain, able to operate at optical communications wavelengths.
The packaging advancements for quantum networks (PAGNet) is led by Alter Technology Tuv Nord UK with Kets Quantum Security, Wave Photonics and Senko Advanced Components (Euro) and aims to develop plug and play packaging for the quantum photonic ICs used in quantum networks.
The team will create a new service that guarantees low-loss, high-density, and repeatable packaging of QPICs and will demonstrate this by showing packaged demonstration devices for QKD and entanglement distribution systems.
Quantum Motion Technologies and University College London are working on Silicon quantum error correction (SiQEC) for spin-based quantum computing systems capable of implementing repeated rounds of QEC, a critical milestone toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.
The Hyperlon project, led by NU Quantum, includes industry giant Cisco for a a full system-level demonstrator of a first-of-its-kind QPI prototype with a clear path towards integration with commercial quantum processing units (QPUs) and robust mass production.
Lumino Technologies is leading the QNET-EPS project with Alter Technology TUV Nord UK, Redwave Labs, Vodafone and Heriot-Watt University to develop a UK supply chain for Entangled Photon Sources (EPS) with sufficiently high entangled photon pair generation to support commercially viable services.
A hybrid testbed for quantum computing will combine deterministic light sources and silicon photonics developed by AEGIQ (along with IQE, Psiquantum and the University of Sheffield. This testbed will use single photon sources for networked quantum information processing operating in channels widely used in telecoms for photonic qubit networking,
The Entanglement enhanced quantum integrated networks (EQUIN) project is led by Toshiba Europe with BT and the University of York to expand the capabilities of QKD networks by integration of emerging cryptographic algorithms that are resistant to quantum computers and quantum networks with entangled photons.
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