The thrill of quantum in 2025
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What a time to be alive. It may not feel that way with the current global industry turmoil, but underneath there are fundamental changes happening.
The shift to quantum computing will create fundamental changes in the industry, and the underlying building blocks are clearly visible. Of course von Neumann machines with a Harvard architecture built in CMOS will continue to be the dominant technology for the semiconductor industry going forwards, but this feels very much like the equivalent of the late 1950s for classical electronics.
From 1955 there were many types of technology being developed for various applications, from germanium and gallium arsenide to bipolar silicon. University and industry labs such as Bell Labs around the world were racing to develop integrated circuits, from Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments to Kurt Lehovec at Sprague Electric and Bob Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor.
The development of complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS) at Fairchild led directly to Intel, while companies such as Sperry, Remington Rand, Burroughs, Amdahl and IBM were all building large-scale, centralised computer systems before the PC revolution.
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Today there are similarly many different technologies for quantum computing. Some are using superconducting Josephson junctions (another technology from the 1960s) while others are building spin qubits on CMOS. Others are trapping ions, moving neutral atoms around a 2D grid, building cat qubits or using nitrogen vacancies in diamond.
“There are 500 quantum computing companies out there,” says Mandy Birch, CEO at TreQ in the UK which builds quantum computers from a variety of technologies. “Superconducting qubits (transmons) are probably the furthest along, but there is a lot of interest in ion traps. There’s also a lot of interest in neutral atoms in the last two to three years as they can be used in an analog mode as well as digital which is less mature.”
“We’ve seen the supply chain develop over the last five years, new cryogenics, room temperature control, wireless and laser systems, and we are now starting to see companies emerge that are developing the quantum processors,” she said. “There is innovation out there but there hasn’t been a landing place for those and that’s what we are doing,” she said.
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There are also photonic systems that do not need to operate around zero Kelvin, and even room temperature systems using diamond vacancies. The supply chains for all of these are maturing, with various approaches to implementing error correction to ensure that the qubits can stick around for long enough to do some useful work. This is requiring millions of physical qubits to deliver hundreds of thousands of logical, error corrected qubits and there are many strategies to connect them all up.
What is different is that the industry has understood the importance of the full stack. IBM was founded in 1911 and has evolved through many different technologies, but has always had a ‘full stack approach’. So quantum computing companies such as Rigetti, D-Wave and Quantinuum are all partnering to run all kinds of algorithms on their hardware for that same full stack.
But this is just like the early days of mainframes, with dedicated algorithms implemented in special ways by ‘quantum wranglers’ to find new materials, new drugs or new ways to optimise the power grid. The next stage will be the general purpose quantum operating system, which is where Microsoft has been driving its own hardware technology.
Where does Europe sit in this evolution? We have vibrant quantum clusters in the Netherlands with companies such as Quantware and in France with Alice and Bob, Pascal and Quobly as well as Finland with IQM successfully commercialising technology from research lab VTT. Infineon Technologies has been driving ion quantum processor technology from Villach, Austria, while the UK is also looking to boost quantum hardware through companies such as Oxford Quantum Machines, Orca Computing, Quantum Motion and Oxford Ionics, as well as Equal1 in Ireland, with quantum computing systems being benchmarked in Oxford later this year.
But the big bucks to support quantum technologies are in the US as venture funds realised the country was being left behind. Honeywell spinout Quantinuum and billion dollar startup PsiQuantum are battling IBM, D-Wave and Rigetti Computing with IonQ and QuEra coming up fast on the outside, with CMOS pioneer Intel a definite contender, in a lovely sense of bringing the technology full circle.
The next five years will see a shaking out of technologies, contenders, architectures, interconnect and software. The exciting times of the late 1950s and early 1960s formed the semiconductor industry we know today, and this is time is when the decisions will be made about the industry for the next fifty years.
Today is World Quantum Day 2025.
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