D-Wave Buys Quantum Circuits in Shift to Higher Gear - EE Times

D-Wave is buying Yale University spinoff Quantum Circuits for $550 million in a shift to the gate-model architecture that larger rivals have been developing for years.On Jan. 7, D-Wave president and CEO Alan Baratz told reporters that the acquisition will accelerate the creation of the world’s first “useful” quantum computers with the adoption of dual-rail technology.“Quantum Circuits is the only company in the world that has this technology,” Baratz said. “We believe this is going to allow us to bring a scaled, error-corrected, superconducting gate-model quantum computer to market ahead of anybody else.”D-Wave, IBM, and Quantinuum are three of the largest quantum computing system vendors.In mid-2025, rival IBM claimed it had the most viable path to fault-tolerant quantum computing. By 2029, the company expects to introduce Quantum Starling, a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of running quantum circuits comprising 100 million quantum gates on 200 logical qubits.In November, Honeywell spinoff Quantinuum sold its Helios quantum computer to Singapore’s National Quantum Office, with installation of the system expected to be completed in 2026.“This is the most powerful quantum computer out there,” David Hayes, director of Computational Design at Quantinuum, told EE Times. “You’ll probably hear a lot of people say that about their quantum computers.”Physical qubits store quantum information but are error-prone. Logical qubits are error-corrected units created by forming a single logical state across many physical qubits.“D-Wave will need to invest quickly to reach qubit counts in the hundreds or thousands, as other vendors have demonstrated,” Bob Sutor, CEO of Sutor Group, said in a report he made available to EE Times. “Our rule of thumb is that practical quantum advantage will get relevant around the 100,000 physical qubits level. Even 100-qubit systems, or 105 in the case of the Google Willow processor or IBM’s Nighthawk, have orders of magnitude to go.”D-Wave said its first gate-model systems will reach a marketplace that consists of research and government organizations this year.“We will be delivering the first 17-qubit dual-rail system later this year, with 49 qubits and 181 qubits in 2027 and 2028,” said Rob Schoelkopf, chief scientist and co-founder of Quantum Circuits, at the press event.(Source: D-Wave)Schoelkopf is the inventor of transmon and dual-rail qubit technologies. Schoelkopf and his colleagues at Yale made breakthroughs that helped build foundations for superconducting gate-model technology.The first deliverable in D-Wave’s accelerated roadmap will be the dual-rail system planned for 2026. The dual-rail qubits will have built-in error detection, which achieves more scale and efficiency with fewer qubits required, avoiding the old approach of inefficiently “brute-forcing” huge volumes of qubits to achieve a certain performance level, D-Wave chief development officer Trevor Lanting told EE Times in an e-mailed response following the press event. Quantum Circuits has been working on dual-rail qubits that have an intrinsic capability to detect errors.“[A dual-rail qubit system] will, on the one hand, allow us to use error detection as a part of the development of quantum algorithms, and on the other hand, it will allow us to error-correct quantum systems with far fewer physical qubits per logical qubit,” Baratz said.D-Wave claims it leads rivals as the first to introduce quantum-annealing technology, with a shorter path to commercialization. Now D-Wave is tackling the hard part: The gate-model devices that the company said a few months ago it and competitors may need about seven years to bring to production.The Quantum Circuits acquisition “will allow us to address the full market for quantum computing, both applications and use cases that can be addressed by annealing and applications and use cases that can be addressed by gate model,” Baratz said.Other companies that started earlier on the development of gate-model technology include IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IonQ, and Quantinuum. IBM and Google are developing superconducting circuits, while IonQ and Quantinuum are working on trapped ions.“The Quantum Circuits technology allows us to get what looks like trapped-ion type error correction with those types of fidelities but with superconducting speeds,” Baratz said.Superconducting approaches have a long-term advantage and will win the race for both annealing and gate architectures, Lanting said, predicting speeds up to 1,000× faster in terms of overall gate operations.For now, the holy grail is quantum advantage, the threshold where a quantum computer can run a computation faster, cheaper, or more efficiently than a classical computer. D-Wave claims to have achieved quantum advantage last year, while competitors like IBM say quantum advantage is still months away.D-Wave has found a new revenue growth driver with the acquisition, according to Sutor, who noted that the absorption of Quantum Circuits will not immediately boost D-Wave’s sales. The acquisition gives D-Wave a first-class foundation for the next phase of the company, he added.Quantinuum claims it is on the doorstep of quantum advantage.The company said its new Helios system has 98 fully connected qubits and 50 logical qubits. Its predecessor, the H2, “was already scratching the surface on quantum advantage on real problems, not just contrived problems to make quantum computers look good,” Hayes said. “Helios will just expand that. It has twice as many qubits, but that doesn’t mean it’s twice as powerful. That means it’s a lot more powerful, if you know about quantum computing and how the power scales with the number of qubits. Helios is already looking at the first microscopic physics that’s thought to be crucial to superconductivity.”Defense contractor Honeywell fabricates the ion-trap chips for Quantinuum in Minnesota.“Honeywell can probably claim to have made the best ion-trap chips in the world,” Hayes said. “I’ve worked with a few out there. It’s been really nice to have a tight coupling between Quantinuum and Honeywell. We can just call them and talk through what might have went wrong, and they can just change their recipe real quick and turn out a new lot, and then we’re off and running again.” Alan has worked as an electronics journalist in Asia for most of his career. In addition to EE Times, he has been a reporter and an editor for Bloomberg News and Dow Jones Newswires. He has lived for more than 30 years in Hong Kong and Taipei and has covered tech companies in the greater China region during that time. You must Register or Login to post a comment.This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.