Infrastructure. Information systems.
There wasn’t so much quantum technology this week, and more administration. The concept of distributed infrastructure had to be explained to some of the audience using familiar consumer experiences.
There was a useful note about the NQCC quantum computing testbeds https://www.eetimes.com/u-k-startup-scaling-quantum-computing-with-photonics/
Aegiq is one of two companies on the NQCC campus utilizing silicon photonics to deliver a full stack quantum computing platform.
Quantum hasn’t yet got to the point where I can say, like I did with Cisco routers long ago “I know where the bits come from and go to underneath that piece of road digging”, though there have been SQUIDs (superconducting quantum interference devices) in use as very sensitive magnetometers for a long time. SQUID sensors market trends
Packaging and photonics links
Lasers https://www.scottishfinancialnews.com/articles/scottish-tech-firm-powerphotonic-targets-new-markets-with-ps26m-maven-funding-boost Maven Capital Partners has invested £2.6 million in Scottish advanced laser systems pioneer PowerPhotonic .. follow on from Archangels and Scottish Enterprise Headquartered in Dalgety Bay, Scotland, with a high-volume manufacturing facility in Arizona, USA, PowerPhotonic is a global leader in precision micro-optics for laser applications.
https://www.novuslight.com/first-electronic-photonic-quantum-chip-manufactured-in-commercial-foundry_N13549.html Global Foundries. Northwestern University, Boston University (BU) and University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) have built a tiny photonic quantum system into a traditional electronic chip.
Nvidia co-packaged silicon photonics – switches – and the partner list https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/networking/products/silicon-photonics/https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/scaling-ai-factories-with-co-packaged-optics-for-better-power-efficiency/ block diagrams
Microsoft – quantum safe cryptography https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/08/20/quantum-safe-security-progress-towards-next-generation-cryptography/
There was a peal of bells, ringing Stedman Doubles, to celebrate the art of bellringing at St Marys in Edinburgh.
More quantum computing and networking material. I’m reading in to the topic, looking for examples of actual utility as well as examples of investment for building out infrastructure.
Q-CTRL Calibration for quantum computing https://q-ctrl.com/technology/quantum-computer-autocalibration? a robust state machine that orchestrates routines from the Function Library, translating them into controller-specific commands and executing them on local hardware. Measurement data flows back for analysis, powering a continuous feedback loop that enhances system performance over time.
Rigetti 2Q results PR https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/08/12/3132141/0/en/Rigetti-Computing-Reports-Second-Quarter-2025-Financial-Results-Announces-General-Availability-of-its-36-Qubit-Multi-Chip-Quantum-Computer.html $350m raise Cepheus-1-36Q is the first multi-chip quantum computer in the industry to achieve this level of performance, and with four chips, contains the largest number of chiplets in a quantum computer. Superconducting qubits. Enhanced intermodule coupler design: Advances in multi-layer chip and tunable coupler design enables higher performance.
Trapped Ions Quantum computing Oxford Ionics https://tech.eu/2025/08/13/oxford-ionics-installs-quantum-computer-at-nqcc $20m revenue
Cloudflare on security for Post Quantum Computing https://www.eetimes.com/inside-the-pqc-overhaul-a-year-later/ Cloudflare has already integrated post-quantum key agreements into the majority of its infrastructure. “Post-quantum encryption is already becoming the default,” Westerbaan said. “I expect that within a year, most TLS connections on the internet will be quantum-secure.” Nevertheless, full migration across hardware, embedded systems, and critical infrastructure will take much longer.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250715219783/en/IonQ-Completes-Acquisition-of-Capella-Space-Advancing-Vision-for-Space-Based-Quantum-Communications IonQ buys Capella Space – Quantum Key Distribution via satellite
Funding $1.6B rolling up other quantum functions https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ionq-secures-1-6-billion-190000833.html
IonQ press https://investors.ionq.com/news/default.aspx Chemical simulation https://investors.ionq.com/news/news-details/2025/IonQ-Speeds-Quantum-Accelerated-Drug-Development-Application-With-AstraZeneca-AWS-and-NVIDIA/default.aspx IonQ and its partners demonstrated a large-scale, end-to-end simulation of a Suzuki-Miyaura reaction, which is the most complex chemical simulation run on IonQ hardware to date. (catalytic reaction with palladium for organic chemistry) The hybrid quantum-classical workflow – orchestrated via CUDA-Q on Amazon Braket, accelerated with NVIDIA H200 GPUs through AWS ParallelCluster – delivered more than a 20x speedup in time-to-solution compared to prior benchmarks. This advancement highlights the scalability of IonQ’s quantum systems and their practical potential in pharmaceutical R&D.
Isolated quantum virtual machines https://techxplore.com/news/2025-07-quantum-bottlenecks-breakthroughs.html HyperQ https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi25-tao.pdf
Music as well as quantum this week since the Festival is on. The banners in the Cathedral depict bellringing changes. Artist Edward Bruce, architect Nick O’Neill. There’s a peal of 12 bells. The Cathedral has lunchtime recitals every day for the next two weeks, and other music.
IBM on quantum advantage .. quantum + classical advantage https://www.nextplatform.com/2025/08/05/ibm-outlines-steps-to-verify-claims-of-quantum-advantage/
IBM and Pasqual paper .. framework for measuring quantum advantage https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20658
IBM expects the first claims of quantum advantage will come from efforts in sampling problems, variational programs, and calculating the expectation values of observables. The challenge now will be to “rigorously confirm” when an advantage has occurred, the researchers wrote. Each part of the computation will have to be verified on their own merit through error detection and mitigation.
If this is the best that IBM can do to explain for what quantum computing should be used, compared to classical computing, there’s a lot of work to do yet.
Cisco quantum marketing https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2025/m07/at-cisco-bold-steps-towards-a-quantum-network.html
quantum entanglement source chip comes in. Pandey called it, “the first building block of a quantum network.” And Nejabati outlined its power and unique attributes.
“Our chip can generate up to 200 million pairs of entangled photons per second,” Nejabati said. “That’s a very high rate. We do it by injecting laser light into our chip, which converts every single photon to two lower-energy entangled photons. And since they are entangled at telco frequency, they can be transported easily. You don’t need a special transport catalyst, just a normal fiber can transfer your entangled photons.” .. entangled particles can transfer or share information, across any distance, via a phenomenon known as teleportation.
“The beauty of it is that photons or other particles could be separated physically, even by a large distance,” “Entanglement actually allows us to transfer quantum information through the teleportation phenomenon.”
Marketing about UK quantum ecosystem and UK Quantum (Sussex) https://tech.eu/2025/07/31/uk-quantum-computing-is-going-universal-through-scaling
Trapped ion “Their solution starts with the iQPU, or integrated Quantum Processing Unit—a proprietary trapped-ion chip designed from the ground up for manufacturability and performance. Each chip is fabricated on a standard 200mm commercial foundry line, a decision that makes industrial scaling feasible. The iQPU itself hosts hundreds of ion qubits on a die larger than 400mm², making it the most spacious chip of its kind in development.
Critically, the chip uses global microwave control rather than relying on traditional laser-based systems. This removed much of the optical complexity found in competing designs and simplifies the overall architecture.
To stitch multiple iQPUs together, UQ developed UQConnect, a proprietary interconnect system that links chips at a rate of 2,424 connections per second, with an ultra-high fidelity of 99.999993%.
Full stack, €67 million contract from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) .. raised close to 100 million pounds.
Financing for quantum https://ff.co/quantum-computing/
Following the money ..
Funding for deeptech companies in Europe – 20 VCs https://tech.eu/2025/07/29/chasing-tech-milestones-not-just-capital-key-lessons-from-the-deeptech-hardware-napkin
McKinsey quarterly report June 2025 https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-year-of-quantum-from-concept-to-reality-in-2025#/
QC companies began a shift toward revenue generation, earning an estimated $650M–$750M in 2024, and are expected to surpass $1B by the end of 2025. The QComm landscape has three key categories (security, networks, and services) and six key verticals: quantum key distribution (QKD) solutions, postquantum cryptography (PQC), modular interconnects, regional networks, quantum global internet, and QComm services. PQC, which has experienced the most commercialization, has the highest level of maturity
Quantum activity in Scotland https://technologyscotland.scot/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Quantum-2023-Report.pdf hardware suppliers
https://www.sdi.co.uk/news/quantum-drive-boosting-the-commercial-potential-of-tech-innovations SDI April 2024
Securing funding for quantum technology projects that may not be immediately profitable is a huge hurdle. However, there are various avenues in the UK to promote development and support ventures scaling up for commercialisation.
Innovate UK, a UK Government agency, has assisted 15 Scottish companies involved with quantum technologies. Earlier this year, the agency awarded £2.34 million to Skylark Lasers to develop critical equipment for quantum-powered navigation systems. The company has also received investment from Scottish Enterprise.
Scepticism and optimism
Sceptics about quantum computers and the requirement for post quantum cryptography https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/17/quantum_cryptanalysis_criticism/
Scott Aaronson being optimistic https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8329 Quantum Computing: Between Hope and Hype
by Scott Aaronson September 16, 2024
Origins of quantum computing – Ray LaFlame obit https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8949 All of a sudden, there was a viable path to building a quantum computer out of photons, where you wouldn’t need to get pairs of photons to interact with each other, which had previously been the central sticking point. The key insight was that feedforward measurements, combined with the statistical properties of identical bosons (what the photons are), are enough to simulate the effect of two-photon interactions.
A language for programming quantum algorithms, independent of the specific type of quantum computer on which they are to run. That this kind of thing gets developed is critical to the enabling larger scale use; CUDA is the NVIDIA programming language which enabled GPUs to be used for other things than ray-tracing and running graphics for gaming.
Quipper language embedded in Haskell – functional programming https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3390 Quipper has been used to program a diverse set of non-trivial quantum algorithms, and can generate quantum gate representations using trillions of gates. It is geared towards a model of computation that uses a classical computer to control a quantum device, but is not dependent on any particular model of quantum hardware. Quipper has proven effective and easy to use, and opens the door towards using formal methods to analyze quantum algorithms.
Cunning Systems 