From Theory to Scale: Architecting the Fault-Tolerant Quantum Software Stack
Speaker
Yuval Baum
VP of Quantum Computing Research at Q-CTRL
Dr. Yuval Baum is the Vice President of Quantum Computing Research at Q-CTRL, where he has led the division for over six years. An expert across the quantum computing stack, his work spans gate optimization, circuit synthesis, error suppression and mitigation, quantum error correction, and algorithm design. Dr. Baum has a proven track record of bridging the gap between frontier science and commercial software, leading cross-functional teams to deliver production-grade quantum solutions. He holds a PhD in Quantum Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science and conducted postdoctoral research at Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM).
Host
Katia Moskvitch
Katia Moskvitch is a science and technology communications leader with deep expertise in quantum computing and advanced research. A former journalist for Nature, Wired, and the BBC, she later led communications for Europe at IBM Research before joining Quantum Machines. She now oversees communications strategy, editorial direction, and storytelling across product, research, and industry initiatives, helping bridge the gap between frontier quantum technologies and broader audiences.
Description
Over the next decade, quantum hardware is projected to scale to hundreds of thousands of physical qubits. Yet, a fundamental architectural disconnect persists: bottom-up physical bottlenecks—such as cryogenic payloads and wiring density—are largely treated independently from top-down quantum error correction (QEC) codes. Here, we bridge this divide with a modular, heterogeneous quantum computing architecture that co-designs task-specific hardware tiers with tailored QEC encodings. Our design establishes an explicit microarchitecture featuring fault-tolerant interfaces between quantum processing units (QPUs) and quantum memories, circumventing the scaling limits inherent to monolithic systems. To evaluate this architecture, we introduce an end-to-end resource estimation framework driven by a custom cross-subsystem compiler. Capable of scaling to 1,000 logical qubits, the framework schedules and maps high-level algorithms directly to hardware-native circuit instructions. Comprehensive resource accounting demonstrates orders-of-magnitude reductions in both logical error rates and physical-qubit footprint compared to monolithic surface-code baselines. For 2048-bit RSA factorization mapped to realistic superconducting planar grids, our baseline design executes in 4.9 days using 439k physical qubits. Integrating modular long-range coupling with a qLDPC quantum memory reduces this requirement to 190k qubits in under 10 days, substantially improving upon the space-time efficiency of state-of-the-art fault-tolerant designs.