Atom Computing, a quantum computing startup, has announced a quantum computing system with unparalleled capabilities. The company's first-generation Phoenix system can pack as many as 100 qubits that are said to be 'exceptionally' stable with long coherence times, thus providing extreme performance potential. Separately, the company announced that it had secured over $15 million in Series A funding and hired a new CEO.
Atom Computing's Phoenix can trap 100 atomic qubits (of an alkaline earth element) in a vacuum chamber with optical tweezers. Then, the quantum states of atomic qubits are manipulated with lasers. The company claims that its qubits are remarkably stable and have very long coherence times (i.e., over 100 ms), making Atom Computing's Phoenix suitable for complex computations.
Using atomic qubits in a vacuum chamber with optical tweezers is not something particularly new. Honeywell makes such systems commercially, yet its quantum computers only have six qubits. Atom Computing says that its laser technologies and platform architecture allow scaling the number of qubits all the way to 100 units. However, the company yet has to showcase such a system.
"Quantum computing has accelerated to a point where it is no longer 10 years out. The scalability and stability of our systems gives us confidence that we will be able to lead the industry to true quantum advantage," said Rob Hays, CEO and President, Atom Computing. "We will be able to solve complex problems that have not been practical to address with classical computing, even with the exponential performance gains of Moore’s Law and massively-scalable cluster architectures."
In addition to revealing the first details about its Phoenix quantum computing system, Atom Computing said that it had secured $15 million in Series A funding from venture capital firms Venrock, Innovation Endeavors, and Prelude Ventures. The money will be spent on building the Phoenix quantum computer system.
Also, the company appointed Rob Hays to the CEO and President position. Previously Hays served for 20 years at Intel, developing the company's Xeon roadmap. Later on, he worked at Lenovo, where he developed the company's strategy for data center products and services.
