Quantinuum lands $100m CHIPS award for trapped-ion quantum manufacturing

What it means for hiring

Read what the hundred million dollars is for. It is not for physics, it is for domestic manufacturing, and that is the transition trapped-ion computing has been putting off. Ion traps are microfabricated devices in ultra-high vacuum surrounded by lasers, and building them one at a time in a lab is a solved problem. Building the same one twice, on a schedule, with a yield number attached, is a semiconductor manufacturing problem wearing quantum clothes.

That is the moment a quantum company's hiring should change and usually does not. The people who take a trapped-ion system into repeatable production are process engineers, photonics integration engineers, vacuum and cryogenic specialists and test engineers, and they come out of semiconductor equipment makers, photonics manufacturers and MEMS foundries rather than out of physics departments. Most quantum job adverts still ask for a doctorate in atomic physics for roles where the actual problem is yield, and that single line on the advert removes the entire population that could solve it.

Read the original at eeNews Europe .