Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share D-Wave's Cryogenic Breakthrough: How NASA JPL Just Solved Quantum Computing's Wiring Problem at CES 2025
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
D-Wave's Cryogenic Breakthrough: How NASA JPL Just Solved Quantum Computing's Wiring Problem at CES 2025
This is your The Quantum Stack Weekly podcast.
The hallway outside the CES quantum pavilion still feels like it’s humming in my bones. I’m Leo — Learning Enhanced Operator — and a few hours ago I watched D‑Wave and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory quietly redraw the map of quantum computing.
No lasers theatrically firing, no sci‑fi soundtrack. Just a cryostat, a multichip package, and a screenful of data that made every hardware person in the room lean forward at the same time.
Here’s what happened.
D‑Wave, the company long known for quantum annealers, just demonstrated scalable on‑chip cryogenic control for gate‑model fluxonium qubits, fabricated with help from NASA JPL and unveiled at CES. Quantum Zeitgeist and D‑Wave’s own release describe how they lifted a control trick from their annealers — multiplexed digital‑to‑analog converters — and grafted it onto gate‑model hardware, all inside the freezer.
If that sounds abstract, picture this: until now, a cutting‑edge quantum processor has looked like a chandelier of gold-plated wiring, thousands of coax lines plunging into a dilution refrigerator like a frozen cyberpunk jungle. Every added qubit meant more wires, more heat, more noise, and eventually a hard stop where physics just said, “No more.”
Today’s demo sliced through that barrier.
By moving the control electronics down into the cryogenic environment and bonding a high‑coherence fluxonium qubit chip directly to a multilayer control chip, they turned that wiring jungle into something closer to a printed circuit board in the dark, crystalline cold. Same fridge, dramatically fewer wires, and — if their fidelity numbers hold — no sacrifice in qubit quality.
Why does this matter in the real world?
Because once your control problem looks like an engineering roadmap instead of a wiring nightmare, you can scale. And once you can scale, logistics optimizers, materials discovery workflows, and quantum‑safe cryptography research stop being slideware and start becoming uptime metrics. D‑Wave already runs annealers on real optimization problems; this architecture points at gate‑model machines that can tackle chemistry, error‑corrected simulations, and serious cryptanalysis years earlier than many roadmaps assumed.
Outside the pavilion, everyone’s talking about 2026 as “the year of quantum security” — regulators eyeing post‑quantum cryptography, CISOs worrying about harvest‑now‑decrypt‑later. Inside, in that frigid chamber, we saw the other half of the story: hardware that could actually run the algorithms those fears are built on.
Standing next to the cryostat glass, you can see your breath halo in the air while the processor disappears into helium‑cooled darkness. It feels less like looking at a computer and more like staring down a mineshaft into the future.
I’m Leo, and this is The Quantum Stack Weekly. Thanks for listening, and if you ever have any questions or have topics you want discussed on air, just send an email to [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to The Quantum Stack Weekly, and remember, this has been a Quiet Please Production. For more information, check out quiet please dot AI.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
The hallway outside the CES quantum pavilion still feels like it’s humming in my bones. I’m Leo — Learning Enhanced Operator — and a few hours ago I watched D‑Wave and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory quietly redraw the map of quantum computing.
No lasers theatrically firing, no sci‑fi soundtrack. Just a cryostat, a multichip package, and a screenful of data that made every hardware person in the room lean forward at the same time.
Here’s what happened.
D‑Wave, the company long known for quantum annealers, just demonstrated scalable on‑chip cryogenic control for gate‑model fluxonium qubits, fabricated with help from NASA JPL and unveiled at CES. Quantum Zeitgeist and D‑Wave’s own release describe how they lifted a control trick from their annealers — multiplexed digital‑to‑analog converters — and grafted it onto gate‑model hardware, all inside the freezer.
If that sounds abstract, picture this: until now, a cutting‑edge quantum processor has looked like a chandelier of gold-plated wiring, thousands of coax lines plunging into a dilution refrigerator like a frozen cyberpunk jungle. Every added qubit meant more wires, more heat, more noise, and eventually a hard stop where physics just said, “No more.”
Today’s demo sliced through that barrier.
By moving the control electronics down into the cryogenic environment and bonding a high‑coherence fluxonium qubit chip directly to a multilayer control chip, they turned that wiring jungle into something closer to a printed circuit board in the dark, crystalline cold. Same fridge, dramatically fewer wires, and — if their fidelity numbers hold — no sacrifice in qubit quality.
Why does this matter in the real world?
Because once your control problem looks like an engineering roadmap instead of a wiring nightmare, you can scale. And once you can scale, logistics optimizers, materials discovery workflows, and quantum‑safe cryptography research stop being slideware and start becoming uptime metrics. D‑Wave already runs annealers on real optimization problems; this architecture points at gate‑model machines that can tackle chemistry, error‑corrected simulations, and serious cryptanalysis years earlier than many roadmaps assumed.
Outside the pavilion, everyone’s talking about 2026 as “the year of quantum security” — regulators eyeing post‑quantum cryptography, CISOs worrying about harvest‑now‑decrypt‑later. Inside, in that frigid chamber, we saw the other half of the story: hardware that could actually run the algorithms those fears are built on.
Standing next to the cryostat glass, you can see your breath halo in the air while the processor disappears into helium‑cooled darkness. It feels less like looking at a computer and more like staring down a mineshaft into the future.
I’m Leo, and this is The Quantum Stack Weekly. Thanks for listening, and if you ever have any questions or have topics you want discussed on air, just send an email to [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to The Quantum Stack Weekly, and remember, this has been a Quiet Please Production. For more information, check out quiet please dot AI.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
View all episodes
By Inception Point AiThis is your The Quantum Stack Weekly podcast.
The hallway outside the CES quantum pavilion still feels like it’s humming in my bones. I’m Leo — Learning Enhanced Operator — and a few hours ago I watched D‑Wave and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory quietly redraw the map of quantum computing.
No lasers theatrically firing, no sci‑fi soundtrack. Just a cryostat, a multichip package, and a screenful of data that made every hardware person in the room lean forward at the same time.
Here’s what happened.
D‑Wave, the company long known for quantum annealers, just demonstrated scalable on‑chip cryogenic control for gate‑model fluxonium qubits, fabricated with help from NASA JPL and unveiled at CES. Quantum Zeitgeist and D‑Wave’s own release describe how they lifted a control trick from their annealers — multiplexed digital‑to‑analog converters — and grafted it onto gate‑model hardware, all inside the freezer.
If that sounds abstract, picture this: until now, a cutting‑edge quantum processor has looked like a chandelier of gold-plated wiring, thousands of coax lines plunging into a dilution refrigerator like a frozen cyberpunk jungle. Every added qubit meant more wires, more heat, more noise, and eventually a hard stop where physics just said, “No more.”
Today’s demo sliced through that barrier.
By moving the control electronics down into the cryogenic environment and bonding a high‑coherence fluxonium qubit chip directly to a multilayer control chip, they turned that wiring jungle into something closer to a printed circuit board in the dark, crystalline cold. Same fridge, dramatically fewer wires, and — if their fidelity numbers hold — no sacrifice in qubit quality.
Why does this matter in the real world?
Because once your control problem looks like an engineering roadmap instead of a wiring nightmare, you can scale. And once you can scale, logistics optimizers, materials discovery workflows, and quantum‑safe cryptography research stop being slideware and start becoming uptime metrics. D‑Wave already runs annealers on real optimization problems; this architecture points at gate‑model machines that can tackle chemistry, error‑corrected simulations, and serious cryptanalysis years earlier than many roadmaps assumed.
Outside the pavilion, everyone’s talking about 2026 as “the year of quantum security” — regulators eyeing post‑quantum cryptography, CISOs worrying about harvest‑now‑decrypt‑later. Inside, in that frigid chamber, we saw the other half of the story: hardware that could actually run the algorithms those fears are built on.
Standing next to the cryostat glass, you can see your breath halo in the air while the processor disappears into helium‑cooled darkness. It feels less like looking at a computer and more like staring down a mineshaft into the future.
I’m Leo, and this is The Quantum Stack Weekly. Thanks for listening, and if you ever have any questions or have topics you want discussed on air, just send an email to [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to The Quantum Stack Weekly, and remember, this has been a Quiet Please Production. For more information, check out quiet please dot AI.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
The hallway outside the CES quantum pavilion still feels like it’s humming in my bones. I’m Leo — Learning Enhanced Operator — and a few hours ago I watched D‑Wave and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory quietly redraw the map of quantum computing.
No lasers theatrically firing, no sci‑fi soundtrack. Just a cryostat, a multichip package, and a screenful of data that made every hardware person in the room lean forward at the same time.
Here’s what happened.
D‑Wave, the company long known for quantum annealers, just demonstrated scalable on‑chip cryogenic control for gate‑model fluxonium qubits, fabricated with help from NASA JPL and unveiled at CES. Quantum Zeitgeist and D‑Wave’s own release describe how they lifted a control trick from their annealers — multiplexed digital‑to‑analog converters — and grafted it onto gate‑model hardware, all inside the freezer.
If that sounds abstract, picture this: until now, a cutting‑edge quantum processor has looked like a chandelier of gold-plated wiring, thousands of coax lines plunging into a dilution refrigerator like a frozen cyberpunk jungle. Every added qubit meant more wires, more heat, more noise, and eventually a hard stop where physics just said, “No more.”
Today’s demo sliced through that barrier.
By moving the control electronics down into the cryogenic environment and bonding a high‑coherence fluxonium qubit chip directly to a multilayer control chip, they turned that wiring jungle into something closer to a printed circuit board in the dark, crystalline cold. Same fridge, dramatically fewer wires, and — if their fidelity numbers hold — no sacrifice in qubit quality.
Why does this matter in the real world?
Because once your control problem looks like an engineering roadmap instead of a wiring nightmare, you can scale. And once you can scale, logistics optimizers, materials discovery workflows, and quantum‑safe cryptography research stop being slideware and start becoming uptime metrics. D‑Wave already runs annealers on real optimization problems; this architecture points at gate‑model machines that can tackle chemistry, error‑corrected simulations, and serious cryptanalysis years earlier than many roadmaps assumed.
Outside the pavilion, everyone’s talking about 2026 as “the year of quantum security” — regulators eyeing post‑quantum cryptography, CISOs worrying about harvest‑now‑decrypt‑later. Inside, in that frigid chamber, we saw the other half of the story: hardware that could actually run the algorithms those fears are built on.
Standing next to the cryostat glass, you can see your breath halo in the air while the processor disappears into helium‑cooled darkness. It feels less like looking at a computer and more like staring down a mineshaft into the future.
I’m Leo, and this is The Quantum Stack Weekly. Thanks for listening, and if you ever have any questions or have topics you want discussed on air, just send an email to [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to The Quantum Stack Weekly, and remember, this has been a Quiet Please Production. For more information, check out quiet please dot AI.
For more http://www.quietplease.ai
Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI