Sandia National Laboratories

New Capabilities

Collaborating on CMOS photonics for quantum computing

Quantum computers could help with drug discovery, codebreaking and materials science, but only if they grow from dozens of quantum bits (qubits) to millions. The bottleneck is control: each qubit needs precisely steered light or microwaves, and thousands of cables run into refrigerators colder than deep space. Chipmakers are trying to move that control hardware onto standard production lines, as CU Boulder's December 2025 optical modulator did.

Updated Nov 1

New Capabilities

As of September 2026: Developer of QUOPS benchmark

Designing software for fault-tolerant quantum computers has meant rebuilding the toolchain every time a hardware maker changes its qubit type or error-correction code. Nvidia's CUDA-Q Logical, announced Sep 14, gives researchers a single programmable layer to model algorithms, error-correction methods, and processor architectures side-by-side before building hardware.

Updated Sep 15

New Capabilities

As of May 2026: Operating world's largest neuromorphic systems for national security research

For decades, simulating the physics of airplane wings, nuclear weapons, or weather systems required warehouse-sized supercomputers consuming megawatts of power. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have now demonstrated that brain-inspired neuromorphic chips can solve these same equations (the partial differential equations underlying nearly all physics simulations) with a fraction of the energy.

Updated May 29