Short term, long term quantum at AXE, page-43

All in my opinion, but I think we still do not appreciate what it takes to bring quantum computing into practical use. I for one have also not begun to fully grasp the volume of work or indeed appreciate the value of AXE quantum work.

Below is an excerpt of the transcript of Pete Shadbolt, chief science officer at Psiquantum speaking a few months ago.

So on photon loss, like what do we actually do? We've probably spent $50 million just making wafers
31:18where each wafer is a tiny, tiny bit better than the last one we made and they all go in the trash.
31:25And there's nothing quantum going on, there's nothing that the editor at "Nature" would be interested in.
31:30It's just pure grind to improve the material quality, the lithography, the design
31:36of the extremely mundane passive optic components. And you spoke to the human component.
31:43Of course, a lot of those people, when we first hired them, they said, "Oh, can we publish papers?" And they said, "Oh, can we do a demo?"
31:50And it takes like a serious effort to say, "No, you may not. You must spend the next four years of your life just staring curve that boringly, slowly, slowly, slowly goes down
32:04thanks to late nights and hard work and a ton of capital." And so yeah, it has taken a concerted effort
32:11to create a culture of people who think that way and who have, as you've seen,
32:16improved losses in these photonic devices well, well, well beyond the state of the art, well beyond
32:24what even Global Foundries could achieve themselves, et cetera. And I'm very proud of the team
32:29for kind of staring at that coalface and just continuing to chip away and not getting distracted along that journey. And I don't think we're unique in that. I think that pretty well every quantum computing platform
32:43has some kind of very hard engineering challenge like that, which isn't gonna get solved
32:50except for with a very long grind. And so yeah, we have cultivated a team of people
32:55who understand why that is a good use of resources.






Shadbolt gives great insight on the quantum industry in many of his talks on Youtube. Paraphrasing from some of them, he says Psiquantum decided not to go the materials engineering route( to make nanomaterials like AXE or Microsoft), but instead has the brute force method of repeated standard silicon wafer manufacture till they have some chips that work with photonic quantum setups. And this is where a lot of the capex goes.

We can then appreciate how careful AXE is being with its cash and how capable with its lithography and design smarts. Not to mention managing the right collaborations. Come on Australia. Wake up to the talent we have in our backyard. We have materials engineers at AXE, we have quantum engineers who are right now building qubits, building superconducting resonators, characterising 2-state systems, entangling them, building codes to make fault tolerant qubits. And all this on a budget!