Analyst: Dr. Bob Sutor
Publication Date: September 20, 2024
Document #: MCNBS202409
Completing the quest to reach Practical Quantum Advantage (PQA), where quantum plus classical computers significantly outperform classical systems alone, is the goal of every quantum computing company. Quantinuum plans to rapidly progress toward this over the next five years by introducing fault tolerance at scale.
What Is Covered in This Article:
- What is the quantum computing company Quantinuum, and why does it believe it will be successful?
- Quantinuum’s roadmap: can it accelerate from dozens to thousands of qubits?
- Quantinuum is not the first to publish a roadmap – who else has done so?
The News: On September 10, ion-trap quantum computing company Quantinuum announced its plan to advance from 56 physical qubits in 2024 to thousands of physical qubits and hundreds of logical qubits by 2029. The plan involves proceeding from Quantinuum’s current H2 architecture through two others until it lands with the “Apollo” system by the decade’s end. For additional details, see the “Quantinuum Unveils Accelerated Roadmap to Achieve Universal, Fully Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing by 2030” announcement.
Quantum in Context: Quantinuum Announces 5-Year Roadmap to Apollo
Analyst Take: Roadmaps are good things – if you can prove you can execute them. After several years of observing the innovations in the semiconductor industry, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors in integrated circuits would double every year. This was too aggressive, and eventually, “Moore’s Law” settled onto a two-year schedule. While not a roadmap itself, the “law” gave manufacturers the confidence to predict their future product development life cycles. After steady and publicly reported progress in ion-trap quantum computing (Cambridge, UK/Boulder, CO), Quantinuum announced where it plans to be by 2030. As a matter of marketing, roadmaps must have some risk, and this one does between 2027 and 2029. I do not doubt that Quantinuum can hit its milestones until 2027. After that, we will need to see massively larger ion-trap quantum charge-coupled devices or a networked quantum processing unit (QPU) architecture for the company to hit its mark in five years. I expect to see research results showing it can do this by the end of 2025.
What Is Quantinuum?
Quantinuum is a quantum computing hardware and software company formed in 2021 by the spinout of the Quantum Solutions team at Honeywell and the subsequent merger with Cambridge Quantum Computing. Although Quantinuum has not gone public, each of its pre-merger organizations was formed in 2014. That is, it is a long-time player in the young quantum industry.
On the software side, Quantinuum’s products and offerings include quantum chemistry applications, quantum random number generation, and its TKET software development kit. TKET, pronounced “ticket,” is a highly regarded competitor to IBM’s Qiskit and Google’s Cirq.
Hardware-wise, Quantinuum uses Ytterbium (Yb) and Barium (Ba) ions and moves and traps them using lasers and electromagnetic fields. It then manipulates the states of electrons to form qubits and execute 1- and 2-qubit gate operations. Quantum trapped ion systems are known for their low error rates and long coherence times, the time spans in which you can perform quantum operations before the qubits become so error-laden that they are useless. However, gate operations are slower than the superconducting approaches of vendors such as IBM and Google. But their coherence times are much shorter than trapped ions!
Confused yet? Understanding the performance of any quantum computing system involves looking at benchmarks that measure all the many interdependent specifications associated with the hardware and the control software. Ultimately, once quantum computers get powerful enough, it will be a question of how well each system works for your use case, balancing speed, accuracy, cost, reliability, access, and energy use.
Competitors to Quantinuum include IonQ, Alpine Quantum Technologies, and Oxford Ionics.
Quantinuum’s Quantum Computing Roadmap to 2029
Quantinuum’s new roadmap shows how they will get to their Apollo system in 2029. The roadmap shows the company’s current H2 system, which they announced in 2023. Note, however, that the values shown are for that system in September 2024.
Given the two-year increments between the H2, Helios, Sol, and Apollo systems, they should have time to advance their ion trap architectures, though this is a risk factor. A delay from Helios to Sol could push Apollo out to 2030 or beyond. Quantinuum is doing research today that will first appear commercially in systems several years away.
The physical qubit counts through Sol are reasonable, given their steady incremental progress in the last two years. There’s a large jump in the plan from Sol to Apollo, and the company should start explaining in late 2025 how that will accomplish that leap. Strong visions and aggressive targets are good, but regular updates must accompany them on the technology and strategy. Things always change.
We’ll need to watch the ratio of physical qubits to logical qubits. Quantinuum believes it will drop below 2 starting in 2025, but if that happens, I expect it will be in Helios’s second or third release. It works closely with Microsoft on error mitigation and correction, and every announcement of progress must precisely define what they mean by “logical qubit.” How much better than a physical qubit is it? In large part, this is the logical error rate, but how much does it impact computation speed?
I encourage Quantinuum to add explicit gate speed targets for its physical and logical qubits to the roadmap.
Roadmaps from Quantinuum’s Competitors and Partners
Many companies have published roadmaps for quantum computing systems:
- Atom Computing with Microsoft (neutral atoms)
- Google (superconducting)
- IBM (superconducting)
- IonQ (trapped ions)
- Infleqtion (neutral atoms)
- Microsoft (topological plus support for others on Azure Quantum)
- Pasqal (neutral atoms)
- QuEra (neutral atoms)
Over the last three years, IBM has been the most aggressive in publishing and updating its roadmaps. Other roadmaps are vague regarding the timelines but give an idea about the number of qubits, gate fidelities, and their path to error correction.
Whatever a company says when publishing the roadmap, it should be held accountable for updates, both good and bad. It’s certainly possible that supply chain or workforce issues can delay progress, but scientific or engineering breakthroughs may accelerate them.
Companies such as Quantinuum and IBM have solid proof of their ability to advance their quantum computing programs. For those that do not, and I am not picking on any in the above list, here is how NOT to create a roadmap:
- Pick your favorite multiplier, either 2 or 10. Call it x.
- Whatever good numbers you have, say the number of qubits, state you will have x times that next year.
- Whatever bad numbers you have, say two-qubit gate error rate, state you will have that number divided by x next year.
- Repeat that process for two more years.
- Skip a year, and then state your good and bad numbers will be exponentially better. This is called the “and then a miracle occurs” phase.
I’m being a bit facetious with this sequence, but observers can and increasingly will see when roadmaps do not match any demonstrated rate of previous progress.
What to Watch
- Timely deployment of the intermediate Helios and Sol architectures
- Quantinuum’s year-by-year progress on hitting the roadmap’s technical milestones
- Counter announcements by Quantinuum’s ion-trap competitors, including IonQ and Oxford Ionics
- Equally aggressive execution on roadmaps from the competing neutral atom quantum modality vendors, including Atom Computing, Infleqtion, QuEra, and Pasqal.
For additional details, see the “Quantinuum Unveils Accelerated Roadmap to Achieve Universal, Fully Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing by 2030” announcement.
In summary, this is a realistic yet aggressive roadmap and set of milestones from Quantinuum that I expect it to achieve in the times stated.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Quantum in Context: A Qubit Primer
Quantum in Context: Microsoft & Quantinuum Create Real Logical Qubits
Quantum in Context: Quantinuum and the Quest for More 9s
Quantinuum Announces Breakthroughs for Quantum Computing Scale-Up
Author Information
Dr. Bob Sutor has been a technical leader and executive in the IT industry for over 40 years. Bob’s industry role is to advance quantum and AI technologies by building strong business, partner, technical, and educational ecosystems. The singular goal is to evolve quantum and AI to help solve some of the critical computational problems facing society today. Bob is widely quoted in the press, delivers conference keynotes, and works with industry analysts and investors to accelerate understanding and adoption of quantum technologies. Bob is the Vice President and Practice Lead for Emerging Technologies at The Futurum Group. He helps clients understand sophisticated technologies in order to make the best use of them for success in their organizations and industries. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, New York, USA. More than two decades of Bob’s career were spent in IBM Research in New York. During his time there, he worked on or led efforts in symbolic mathematical computation, optimization, AI, blockchain, and quantum computing. He was also an executive on the software side of the IBM business in areas including middleware, software on Linux, mobile, open source, and emerging industry standards. He was the Vice President of Corporate Development and, later, Chief Quantum Advocate, at Infleqtion, a quantum computing and quantum sensing company based in Boulder, Colorado USA. Bob is a theoretical mathematician by training, has a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College.
He’s the author of a book about quantum computing called Dancing with Qubits, which was published in 2019, with the Second Edition released in March 2024. He is also the author of the 2021 book Dancing with Python, an introduction to Python coding for classical and quantum computing. Areas in which he’s worked: quantum computing, AI, blockchain, mathematics and mathematical software, Linux, open source, standards management, product management and marketing, computer algebra, and web standards.
