Dr. Stavroula Kapoulea, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Kelvin Quantum, will lead a four-year project after receiving a £1.65 million UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship. The funding addresses a critical barrier to building practical quantum computers: the heat generated by the hundreds of cables currently needed to control qubits.

At around 1,000 wires, up to half of a cryostat’s cooling power is used simply to remove heat from these connections, making further scaling physically impossible. Kapoulea said she is excited for the opportunity to bring together a team, build on the partnerships Kelvin Quantum has developed, and take their technology further.

Kelvin Quantum’s £1.65M Fellowship Enables Scalable Quantum Control

This previously unaddressed issue threatens to halt progress towards building practical quantum computers with the necessary qubit counts for complex calculations. The four-year project, named CONQRETE, will focus on integrating quantum control and readout electronics into the ultra-cold environment where qubits operate. Five organizations are collaborating on this undertaking: Kelvin Quantum, the National Quantum Computing Centre, the National Physical Laboratory, Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult and Keysight Technologies.

This coordinated effort will advance cryogenic chip design, packaging techniques and the necessary measurement and control software simultaneously. The ultimate test will involve a real quantum processor fully controlled and read out from within the cryostat itself, demonstrating a pathway to overcome current thermal limitations. This approach aims to bypass the heat-generating bottleneck created by hundreds of room-temperature wires running into the near-absolute-zero environment, and the project’s scope extends beyond simply reducing heat to fundamentally change how quantum computers are built and controlled.

Source: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_1300293_en.html

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