We celebrated our fourth birthday on a sunny day in Delft. Let’s take a moment to look back at our growth and insights of the past years. Highlights that stand out are our bold choice for a unique position in the value chain, confirmation of the necessary transition from lab to fab and our sale of the first 100+ qubit quantum chip test equipment.
The growing OrangeQS team, enjoying a sunny day in Delft, The Netherlands
With the fourth anniversary of our founding on 7 September 2020, we’re proud to look back at the development of our company into to a lean but impactful team of about 30 people.
The five founders all came from QuTech, the Delft institute for quantum computing and the quantum internet. In 2020 they had contributed in different ways on launching the Quantum Inspire, the first publicly accessible quantum computer in Europe and the first system which could address both superconducting and spin qubits. The founders chose to build full-stack systems to tackle a bottleneck that all companies making quantum chips were expected to face at some point: high-throughput quantum chip testing.
One of our core assumptions was that more and better qubits would be required to build useful quantum computers. It looks like that assumption is true today more than ever. The quantum industry is clearly is moving beyond error mitigation and into the direction of implementing error correction techniques with an overhead of many, high-quality, physical qubits which are needed to keep quantum information ‘alive’ in a single logical qubit. For quantum usefulness, many of these logical qubits will be needed.
Our second assumption was that the only way to achieve more and better qubits on quantum chips, the ecosystem had to transition ‘from lab to fab’. We expected most progress to be made by quantum computing companies that took a semicon-inspired approach, with professional production pipelines and metrology processes. Test equipment by OrangeQS could then close the ‘quantum device engineering cycle’ of design-production-testing, as well as being used for end-of-line testing.
Over the past years we have seen industry leadership from IBM Quantum, who made their QPU development roadmap public in 2020. Although it was far from sure that anyone could achieve this projected cadence of progress, IBM has kept achieving their milestones every year, cementing them as the global leader in the field of superconducting qubits. It is also worth highlighting that IQM, the Finnish-German quantum computer builder, built the first dedicated quantum chip fab in Europe. IQM has also clearly realized that the reliable fabrication of ever more capable quantum chips is one of the core enablers for quantum computing. Together with the organization of the immensely successful Superconducting Qubits and Algorithms Conference (SQA) in Europe and the recent announcement by IQM of their capacity for producing 20 quantum computers per year, this cements them as the leading European quantum computer builder. Lastly, we can highlight QuantWare as the first company to offer quantum chips commercially. It emphasizes the need to innovate in business models as well as technology, on our way to better quantum chips for useful quantum computers.
Our own highlights in the past years have been our steps towards becoming the global leader in quantum chip testing. We started by launching subsystems of this test equipment as separate products for the R&D market, like Superconducting Qubit Tools, OrangeQS Rack and OrangeQS R&D System. Since we landed a VC investment, EIC Accelerator grant and first industry customer in 2023, we have been fully focused on utility-scale quantum chip test equipment. Keep an eye out for the product launch later this year.
To celebrate our diverse team of highly driven people, we had a team building day Delft. We are proud to share that we broke the all-time record of the local app-based quiz, which involved speed, smarts and teamwork. Exactly what we need in a global leader for quantum chip testing!
