- Quantum Brilliance has built quantum hardware that overcomes one of the technology's key challenges
- The next step is to sort quantum error correction algorithms that would make the system commercially viable
- Quantum computers won't hit the market in earnest for "a while," a Quantum Brilliance exec said
Quantum computers by and large are cool customers – that is, they typically require extremely cold temperatures to operate. But a company called Quantum Brilliance says it has developed a quantum system that can run at room temperature. And – we don’t know how else to put this – that’s kind of a big deal.
Founded in 2019 as a spin-out from Australian National University, Quantum Brilliance has been working to build quantum chips comprised of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers embedded in synthetic diamonds. Before your eyes glaze over, this just means that the company is embedding qubits – the basic units of information in the quantum world – into a solid-state material to allow the computer to operate without extreme cooling.
“It means we have long enough coherence time, so long enough usability of the qubit, even without the need of cooling down,” Andrea Tabacchini, Quantum Brilliance’s VP of Product and Marketing, told Fierce.
In practice, this could make it possible to house quantum computers in racks, potentially even alongside classical computers. The trick, of course, is integrating quantum computers and classical computing processors like CPUs and GPUs.
To this end, Quantum Brilliance is working with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to explore the mechanics of hybrid computing. Quantum Brilliance deployed a small cluster of three quantum computers in the lab late last year. The cluster is housed in what looks very similar to a traditional data center rack.
At the time, Oak Ridge’s Leadership Computing Facility Program Director Ashley Barker said the lab team would work on “co‑scheduling, end‑to‑end performance tuning, data and workflow orchestration, workforce development and more — so we can eventually move HPC-quantum integration from a conceptual pilot to a fully embedded capability within leadership computing.”
For the record, Quantum Brilliance isn’t the only entity working on room-temperature quantum technology. Scientists at Stanford University and a company called Xanadu have both demonstrated quantum technology that doesn’t require supercooling. But Quantum Brilliance certainly seems to be a bit further along the path.
Still, there’s also more work to be done to make its quantum technology ready for commercial deployments, Tabacchini said. While it’s sorted the hardware side of things, Quantum Brilliance is now working on quantum error correction algorithms.
“A fault-tolerant quantum computer is really what one needs” to operate at the commercial level, he explained. That means implementing both noise and error correction.
While Quantum Brilliance’s computer is more immune to temperature and vibration (which are physical kinds of noise), “even a perfect quantum computer is still subject to noise,” he said. Quantum error correction algorithms help cut through the noise to create a fault-tolerant computer that is capable of accurate calculations.
But it’s "going to take a while," Tabacchini said. In the meantime, he added, the company plans to peddle its quantum magnetometry tech, which can provide high-resolution sensing for everything from industrial and transport applications to healthcare.