Current supply chain

The current stage of Nu Quantum’s technology development does not require a complex supply chain. However, risks with supply chain can cause tangible challenges to our technical deliverables.

Our world leading Quantum Networking technology requires high accuracy, custom parts from, often, low-TRL manufacturing partners. These partners can have long lead times (in excess of 12 months in some cases) and highly bespoke requirement specifications from Nu Quantum side.

This is common within the quantum industry as a whole at this point in time; as we are working with the same set of suppliers as other companies developing quantum hardware solutions.

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Development of the Supply Chain Post Series-A

As Nu Quantum move towards developing systems for deployment at customer sites, both prototypes and fully certified systems; there will be the need to develop a number of key capabilities within our supply chain.

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Supply Chain Maturity

As previously mentioned , the current quantum industry supply chain as a whole is immature with respect to scale, quality and delivery timescales. To enable Nu Quantum to deliver scalable DQC systems, suppliers will require the capability to manufacture high volume, high quality, commoditised quantum computing hardware. To do this we will need to have:

• Well defined and achievable performance requirements.
• High confidence in scalable architectures that allow investment into high volume manufacturing to be justified.
• Suitable benchmarking techniques and automated verification testing to reduce manufacturing time and increase component quality.
• Full system understanding to allow targeted cost down value engineering to be completed by the manufacturer and Nu Quantum as the system integrator.

Nu Quantum is ready to lead the development of the quantum industry supply chain. Our Fault Tolerant Distributed Quantum Computing architecture provides the understanding of scale. The effort to characterise our Quantum Networking Subsystems provides both performance requirements and clear benchmarking approaches for our technology. Finally, the acceleration of our systems integration expertise via development of our Quantum Network Testbed Systems will provide Nu Quantum with system engineering confidence at all levels.

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Cost Down Design

As we move from early phase prototyping and sub-system development, which is often high cost and labour intensive, we will need to run a design cost down process to ensure the financial viability and scalability of Nu Quantum’s roadmap architecture.

This cost-down process will involve re-evaluating designs, materials, and manufacturing techniques to identify opportunities for cost optimisation, such as through material substitution, design simplification, or economies of scale.

This will fundamentally lower the unit cost, increasing margins and ensuring Nu Quantum’s full system offering is able to provide value beyond it’s cost for the end customer.

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Quality Function

Transitioning to delivering systems to testbed contracts and products to end customers (described on the Product Roadmap), Nu Quantum will deploy a suitable Quality Management System (QMS) to manage procedures for product testing, validation, compliance, and continuous improvement. This will also include a Document Management System (DMS) to manage controlled documentation and versioning.

This function will be critical as Nu Quantum grows to ensure that our technology is not only cutting edge in terms of performance but also in terms of reliability, manufacturability and scalability.

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