Boulder quantum incubator launching open-access timing testbed

BOULDER — The Colorado Quantum Incubator, a collaborative facility in Boulder’s Flatiron Park corporate campus, is launching what it calls the “nation’s first open-access, commercially available third-party validation testbed for quantum timing technologies.”

The testbed provides a facility “where companies, research institutions, and government agencies can, for the first time, test and demonstrate precision timing technologies for the commercial, defense, and research markets,” COQI said in a news release. 

Establishing the timing-validation environment was a partnership between Stout Street Capital, Lafayette-based space-based timing architecture firm Xairos Systems Inc. and BioMed Realty LLC, which owns much of the real estate within Flatiron Park. 

“Precision timing underpins virtually every piece of modern digital infrastructure, from financial trading platforms and data centers to power grids and telecommunications networks,” COQI executive director Chris Muldrow said in the release. “Yet no third-party facility currently exists in the U.S. to validate the next generation of quantum timing solutions. COQI is closing that gap.”

The 13,000-square-foot incubator space on Central Avenue opened last year as a result of an effort spearheaded by the University of Colorado, with the support of Colorado State University, Colorado School of Mines and Elevate Quantum. 

Quantum theory attempts to explain the behavior of matter at atomic and subatomic levels. Because quantum computers take advantage of special properties of quantum systems such as superposition, their computing power and speed are exponentially greater than a traditional computer.

The Boulder Valley — with the CU physics department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) — has become, over the past three decades or so, one of the world’s premier quantum hubs.

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