Comments on IBM’s Acquisition of the HRL Laboratories

By Doug Finke IBM Quantum’s announcement about their intended acquisition of HRL Laboratories is quite important and a little surprising. But if you look at this further, there are good reasons why this makes a lot of sense. Here are our thoughts on this.

Technology Transitions If you look at the history of technology development, you will find that it is quite common for a new technology to start off with one type of implementation and then later transition to a much different implementation that provides improved cost, performance, or quality. A good example is the semiconductor industry which started with discrete bipolar germanium transistors, then transitioned to discrete bipolar silicon transistors, then bipolar integrated circuits, then NMOS. And now CMOS is the dominant, but not exclusive technology used for building a semiconductor. There are still niche applications where other technologies, such as GaAs, SiC and others is still used. Similaryl you can see examples in displays which went from cathode ray tubes (CRT) to plasma displays to LED displays to OLED displays or in railroad locomotives which transitioned from steam to diesel electric. It is quite probably that we will see a similar phenomena occur with quantum computing technology. Superconducting qubits based upon Josephson junctions are still the most mature quantum technology, but there are other technologies that are coming on strong. This modality will still have a very good run in the near and medium term, much like CRTs and bipolar silicon transistors. But it is quite possible that other technologies will supersede it in the long term. The spin qubit technology being developed by HRL has a few theoretical advantages that might work in their favor over the long term. A significant advantage is that the die area per qubit is orders of magnitude smaller than a superconducting qubit. This can potentially allow manufacturers to put as many as a million qubits or more on a single chip, providing a significant cost and form factor advantage. In addition, the spin qubit technology is a modality that is the most compatible with standard semiconductor processing.

Large Companies Like Insurance Policies Given the phenomena of technology transitions mentioned above, sometimes large companies will implement programs to serve as a backup plan in the event that such a transition does happen. One of the biggest risks that any large company faces is to miss a technology transition. Think of Kodak missing the transition to digital photography or Blockbuster missing the transition to streaming, or Blackberry missing the transition to smart phones. Although it is very difficult to predict when or if such a transition will occur, smart companies will strategize about this and put in place what we call “insurance policies” to mitigate the risk. We are starting to see this occur in quantum. For example, last year Google purchased Quantum Circuits Inc. Although both use superconducting qubits, there are significant differences as Google has traditionally used planar transmon qubits while Quantum Circuits uses dual rail cavity qubits. Google is also an investor in neutral atom company QuEra and has also set up its own neutral atom development program in Colorado. Similarly, IonQ has acquired Oxford Ionics to take advantage of the latters ion trap technology controlled by microwaves energy from IonQ’s previous approach of implementing control using lasers.men Taking Advantage of IBM’s Strong Quantum Ecosystem One area where IBM has excelled is in building a strong quantum ecosystem to take advantage of their hardware. Through the development of the Qiskit SDK, extensive education programs, partnerships with universities, partnerships with quantum software companies, providing a fleet of easily accessible quantum computers on the web, and leveraging the existing classical relationships with many of the world’s leading enterprises, they currently enjoy the highest customer revenue base of any quantum provider. Conversely, HRL has not traditionally developed the commercial go-to-market capabilities that IBM has been doing for a hundred years. HRL has developed promising spin qubit technology and presented some impressive papers on it at the APS meeting last March. They have also developed a solution called spinQICK that is specifically designed to control electrostatically confined semiconductor spin-qubits. But it is not clear that anyone besides a small number of universities are using this. Working with IBM may help them proliferate their technology.

Leveraging Anderon As we reported in May, IBM is partnering with the U.S. Department of Commerce to establish a quantum foundry called Anderon. Anderon will heavily leverage the technology and facilities of the Albany NanoTech Complex, but it is likely that the HRL technology will be a perfect fit for this venture given the similarity of their technology to semiconductor processing mentioned earlier. Anderon will certainly have much more advanced wafer processing capability than what HRL is using today and this will allow them to accelerate the development of their spin qubit technology. Potential of Leveraging SFQ Logic from SEEQC One of the biggest challenges in scaling quantum processors to a large number of qubits is the challenge of routing all the wires to control the operation of the qubits. Although most superconducting systems use coaxial or flex cables today, many are working on cryoCMOS integrated circuits that operate at low temperature and can be place near the qubit chip. This eliminates routing a rat’s nest of wires from the room temperature control electronics down the dilution refrigerator. An even more advanced version of logic than cryoCMOS is called Single Flux Quantum (SFQ). SFQ logic has significant advantages in a quantum system because it is based upon superconducting Josephson junctions and consume orders of magnitude less heat and power. In addition, SFQ logic is very fast and operates at speeds of 10’s of gigahertz. IBM is partnering with SEEQC to use this technology on DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) program. Although we don’t know for sure, IBM may decide to try to combine this SFQ logic with the HRL spin qubits for future processors.

The Future Importance of Cost per Qubit Another lesson from technology history is that cost will ultimately become an important factor. There is not a big emphasis on it right now because hardware teams are focusing on just building something that really works. But, if we learn from the past, cost will ultimately play an important role when users have the ability to choose between multiple providers. Australian spin qubit company Diraq is already promoting a goal of one dollar per qubit. Achieving this will be very hard if one needs to reach a million qubits by networking multiple QPUs together to create a larger system. Due to die area per qubit and other considerations, GQI projects that superconducting systems won’t be able to fit more than a few thousand qubits in a single module before networking multiple systems will be required to go beyond that. Conclusions So based upon the reasons expressed above, IBM has a lot of good reasons to acquire HRL. This is not to say that spin qubits will quickly replace superconducting systems on IBM’s roadmap. The superconducting processors still have a long and important role ahead for the next several years as IBM brings their Starling and Blue Jay machines to market. But if you look out beyond that, there will likely be a need for new approaches and this may be where the HRL spin qubit technology will fit in. But there is one other question about the acquisition that needs to be answered. HRL works in many other areas besides spin qubit quantum computers. These include quantum sensors, advanced materials, MEMS, high frequency electronics using Gallium Nitride, vision systems, neuromorphic computing, autonomous systems, and other advanced technologies. Very little was mentioned in IBM’s press release about these other areas and it remains to be seen what IBM will do with these technologies from HRL. We will need to wait and find out. Successfully integrating a new corporate acquisition can always present challenges and we wish IBM the best of luck in achieving their goals. July 23, 2026