UCLA-Led Consortium Secures $4 Million NSF Grant for 60 Logical Qubit Trapped-Ion Architecture

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $4 million grant to a multidisciplinary consortium led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). This funding, provided under the NSF’s National Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NQVL) initiative, will support a project titled "FTL: Accelerating Fault-Tolerant Quantum Logic." The initiative aims to design a fault-tolerant quantum computer featuring 60 logical qubits, intended to serve as a benchmark for digital quantum simulations capable of surpassing classical supercomputers.

The project employs a trapped-ion Quantum Charge-Coupled Device (QCCD) architecture, where atomic ions are shuttled across a chip-based trap to enable all-to-all connectivity and high gate fidelities. The FTL consortium is pursuing a full-stack co-design approach, involving experts in atomic physics, chip fabrication, compilation, and quantum algorithms to reduce physical-to-logical qubit overhead. This hardware design is specifically targeted at advancing digital quantum simulation to tackle complex problems in materials science, chemistry, and physics.

The consortium features a broad coalition, including academic institutions such as UC Berkeley, Cornell, University of Maryland, and UC Santa Barbara, as well as research and commercial partners including Quantinuum, Nvidia, IonQ, and SRI International. By fostering this collaborative ecosystem, the project seeks to establish an open academic framework for scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Source: quantumcomputingreport.com
Publication date: 08.08.2026
Author: dougfinke