US Department of Energy Unveils Post-Exascale R&D Program

The US government recently stood up a consortium of six Washington D.C.-based federal agencies to explore a range of quantum technologies necessary to create, demonstrate, and operate DC-QNet, a regional, multi-kilometer quantum network testbed. The six participating agencies span a range of US government mission agencies including the National Security Agency, the US Naval Research Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The program targets key underlying technologies needed to implement a metro[1]area quantum network that includes high-fidelity quantum memory, single photon devices, and related network metrology as well as mechanisms to support quantum entanglement between network nodes in a quantum computer. Details about project schedule and budget have not yet been made available, but each participating agency will be responsible for funding its research activities.

Seeking to establish a die-to-die interconnect standard and foster an open chiplet ecosystem, a strong collection of major chip makers and users recently announced the formation of the UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) industry consortium. The consortium has published version 1.0 of the UCIe specification, covering the die-to-die I/O physical layer, die-to-die protocols, and software stack. Promoter members of the consortium are Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc. (ASE), AMD, Arm, Google Cloud, Intel Corporation, Meta, Microsoft Corporation, Qualcomm Incorporated, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)