Innovate UK has announced five further winners of the Quantum Missions pilot competition following the allocation of an additional £10 million funding.
These winners are in addition to those previously announced.
The funding aims to accelerate the Quantum Computing and Quantum Networks technologies by increasing their capabilities and removing technological barriers to their commercialisation and adoption.
Roger McKinlay, Challenge Director, Quantum Technologies, Innovate UK said:
These winners are a result of additional funding for this competition which will help us to cement our position as a global leader in this field.
The five new projects
HERMES: highly enhanced real-time metrics for error-corrected superconducting quantum computers
Lead: Rigetti UK Limited
This project is a collaborative effort involving Rigetti, Riverlane and the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) Superconducting Circuits Team. It will focus on benchmarking and enhancing the quantum error correction (QEC) capabilities of superconducting quantum computers, leveraging Rigetti’s superconducting quantum computing testbed hosted at the UK NQCC.
Rigetti will upgrade the testbed by deploying a larger and higher-performing quantum processing unit (QPU) and enhancing the control systems, which will be integrated with Riverlane’s QEC stack.
Riverlane will lead the QEC experiments, identifying key improvements to enhance system performance and meet crucial QEC metrics. The NQCC Superconducting Circuits Team will support system upgrades and ensure quality assurance for QEC experiments.
DECIDE: Dimon error correction integrated into a data-centre environment
Lead: Oxford Quantum Circuits Limited (OQC)
OQC-Riverlane proposes to conduct a major programme of work building on existing efforts around novel qubit design, error correction and datacentre integration.
Brought together it aims to demonstrate hardware-efficient QEC techniques in a commercial datacentre environment. It will serve as a testbed for further QEC development that takes advantage of QEC-optimisation across the computing stack.
QEC capabilities tested on real hardware in a real commercial environment is key towards achieving the UK’s quantum mission goal.
Open Architecture Quantum Testbed
Lead: Treq Global Ltd
TreQ, Qruise, Q-CTRL, Oxford Ionics, and Rigetti are collaborating to create an open-architecture quantum computing testbed.
This project unites industry leaders to develop a modular, extensible system for integrating and evaluating quantum components and processors across the supply chain, serving the global market from the UK.
A key innovation of this project is its flexible design, offering eight unique configurations by combining two quantum processors, two control systems, and two quantum software stacks.
This capital-efficient approach maximises value by enabling extensibility and upgrades, ensuring this taxpayer investment supports long-term advancements in a rapidly evolving field.
SQALE2
Lead: Coldquanta UK Limited
To best serve the UK quantum industry and ensure the SQALE device remains at the cutting-edge of technology, a consortium of UK experts is collaborating to upgrade the device and to rigorously benchmark the improvements.
In addition to providing a step-change in machine performance, the research and development efforts involved in the upgrades will push the boundaries of neutral-atom control systems in ways that will be exploited across Infleqtion’s global quantum computing portfolio, and the wider quantum technology industry.
In parallel to upgrading the SQALE device, the project team will work with key stakeholders that will benefit from the numerous advantages quantum computing will bring to the UK.
From applications of security with the national government to the economic and societal impact at the local governmental level, by bringing together expertise in quantum software they will help the NQCC to deliver its core mission of using quantum computing to unlock economical and societal value for the British public.
VELOX-QP
Lead: Duality Quantum Photonics Ltd
In this project, Duality will design, make and commission a photonic QPU called VELOX-QP that serves as a quantum computing testbed, and as a building block for a future networked modular architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computing. VELOX-QP will support a range of different quantum algorithms operated by industrial end users.
These will include systems engineers at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and quantum professionals such as computer scientists at the Digital Catapult who are interested in trialling quantum error correction techniques. VELOX-QP will be manufactured at Duality’s Southampton nano-fabrication site, and assembled and operated at Duality’s Bristol laboratories.
This project brings together a powerful combination of skills across hardware, quantum computing and communications, industrial systems engineering and applications.
Duality has deep experience of full stack design and fabrication of photonic quantum hardware.
Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult has valuable expertise in hardware testing and verification, while BT and the University of Bristol’s High Performance Networks group bring know-how in quantum networking hardware and infrastructure.