2025-12-25 01:55:46
Achieve reliable hermetic sealing for millimeter-scale microbatteries using dual-seal epoxy adhesive methods that maximize energy density while preventing electrolyte leakage and moisture ingress.
What Attendees will Learn
2025-12-25 00:00:02
There is a misconception among some that IEEE accredits engineering programs in the United States, but that is the responsibility of ABET.
The global, nonprofit agency accredits academic programs leading to degrees in specific disciplines. It does not accredit the institution, school, college, department, facilities, courses, or faculty—only specific academic programs.
IEEE and other professional organizations help evaluate programs for ABET, but they do not have the authority to accredit programs themselves.
There are 34 organizations, including IEEE, that are ABET members and assist the nonprofit with setting policy, developing strategy, and conducting accreditation activities worldwide.
IEEE’s partnership with ABET began in 1932 with an IEEE predecessor society, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. AIEE, along with six other engineering organizations, founded the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development, which evolved into ABET.
Today more than 4,770 programs at 930 colleges and universities in 42 countries and regions are accredited by ABET. IEEE serves as the lead society for 877 of the programs.
IEEE and the other professional societies provide ABET with volunteer program evaluators. The evaluators are assigned to visit educational institutions that seek accreditation. The evaluators provide assessments based on specific criteria developed in collaboration with ABET and the societies. Evaluators must have experience in industry, academia, or government.
Once IEEE volunteers have five or more years of experience serving as a program evaluator, they may be nominated to serve on the IEEE Committee on Engineering Technology Accreditation Activities (CETAA) or the IEEE Committee on Engineering Accreditation Activities (CEAA). IEEE Educational Activities supports these committees, and all of IEEE’s responsibilities with ABET. After spending two to four years on one of the committees, a volunteer may be nominated to serve on one of ABET’s commissions, giving them the opportunity to serve as a team chair.
“Years of developing and leading undergraduate electrical and computer engineering programs, including preparing for ABET accreditation reviews, led me to believe that becoming an ABET program evaluator would be a great way to learn new ways to improve the quality of our own programs while also assisting others.” —Victor Nelson
Each accreditation visit is led by a team chair, who is the primary point of contact for an institution whose programs are being evaluated. The term for the position is typically five years, with the option to serve a three-year term on the executive committee of ABET’s Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) and Engineering Technology Accreditation Commission (ETAC).
There are about 380 IEEE evaluators, 26 of whom are currently serving as IEEE commissioners on ABET’s EAC and ETAC.
The CETAA and CEAA choose new program evaluators annually. The number of applicants selected varies from year to year to ensure there are enough evaluators available for future accreditation visits.
For the 2025–2026 academic year, IEEE received 126 applications for the EAC and the ETAC. Applications were received from 24 countries, with 105 from academia and 21 from industry or government.
Victor Nelson, an IEEE life senior member, has been a program evaluator for more than two decades. He is a professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at the Ginn College of Engineering at Auburn University, in Alabama. Nelson’s service as an evaluator was recognized with the 2024 IEEE EAB Meritorious Achievement Award in Accreditation Activities. The award was established in 1984 to recognize “efforts to foster the maintenance and improvement of education through the process of accreditation.”
“Years of developing and leading undergraduate electrical and computer engineering programs, including preparing for ABET accreditation reviews, led me to believe that becoming an ABET program evaluator would be a great way to learn new ways to improve the quality of our own programs while also assisting others,” Nelson says. “My 23 years of conducting ABET reviews have more than confirmed that belief and have been incredibly rewarding.
“As a program evaluator, I have had the privilege of studying and visiting programs around the world, and I never fail to be impressed with and learn from the efforts and achievements of the many students and faculty in those programs.
“I always feel a sense of pride in being able to make modest contributions to improving the quality of engineering education through the accreditation review process.”
To learn more about why accreditation matters, read “How IEEE Ensures Quality in Engineering Education,” published last year in The Institute.
To become an IEEE program evaluator, apply here.2025-12-24 22:00:02
Usually, I start off these annual highlights posts by saying that it was the best year ever for robotics. But this year, I’m not so sure. At the end of 2024, it really seemed like AI and humanoid robots were poised to make a transformative amount of progress towards some sort of practicality. While it’s certainly true that progress has been made, it’s hard to rationalize what’s actually happened in 2025 with the amount of money and hype that has suffused robotics over the course of the year. And for better or worse, humanoids are overshadowing everything else, raising questions about what will happen if the companies building them ultimately do not succeed.
We’ll be going into 2026 with both optimism and skepticism, and we’ll keep doing what we always do: talking to the experts, asking as many hard questions as we can, and making sure to share all the cool robots, even (or especially) the ones that you won’t see anywhere else.
So thanks for reading, and to all you awesome robotics folks out there, thanks for sharing your work with us! IEEE Spectrum has a bunch of exciting new stuff planned for 2026, and as we close out 2025, here’s a quick look back at some of our best robotics stories of the year.
Eddie Guy
Humanoid robots are hard, and they’re hard in lots of different ways. For some of those ways, we at least understand the problems and what the solutions will likely involve. But there are other problems that have no clear solutions, and most humanoid companies, especially the well-funded ones, seem quite happy to wave those problems away while continuing to raise extraordinary amounts of money. We’re going to keep calling this out whenever we see it, and expect even more skepticism in 2026.
CFOTO/Future Publishing/Getty Images
Security is one of those pesky little things that is super important in robotics but that early-stage robotics companies typically treat as an afterthought because it doesn’t drive investment. Chinese manufacturer Unitree is really the one company with humanoids robots that are available enough and affordable enough for clever people to perform a security audit on them. And to the surprise of no one, Unitree’s robots had serious vulnerabilities, which as of yet have not all been fixed.
Amazon
The thing I appreciate about the folks at Amazon Robotics is how relentless they are in finding creative solutions for problems at scale. Amazon simply doesn’t have time to mess around, and they’re designing robots to do what robots do best: specific repetitive tasks in structured environments. In the current climate of robotics hype, it’s refreshing, honestly.
Boston Dynamics
Did I mention that humanoids robots are hard? Whether or not anyone can deliver on the promises being made about them (and personally, I’m leaning more and more strongly towards not), progress is being made towards humanoids that are much more capable and versatile than they ever have been. The collaboration between Toyota Research and Boston Dynamics on large behavior models is just one example of how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.
Lindsey Nicholson/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
My least favorite story to write happened right at the end of the year—iRobot filed for bankruptcy. This was not a total surprise; regulators shutting down an acquisition by Amazon in 2024 essentially gutted the company, and it’s been limping along towards the inevitable since then. Right after the news was announced, we spoke with iRobot co-founder and ex-CEO Colin Angle, who had plenty to share about where things went wrong, and what we can learn from it.
Evan Ackerman
My favorite story of 2025 was as much about cows as it was about robots. I was astonished to learn just how many fully autonomous robots are hard at work on dairy farms around the world, and utterly delighted to also learn that these robots are actively improving the lives of both dairy farmers and the dairy cows themselves. Dairy farming is endless hard work, but thanks to these robots, small family farms are able to keep themselves sustainable (and sane). Everybody wins, thanks to the robots.
2025-12-24 21:00:02
To the untrained eye, it did not look like a particularly complicated mission. A large black quadcopter drone, more than two meters spanning the propeller tips, sat parked on the grass. Nestled between the legs of its landing gear was a red balloon filled with water. Not far away, on a concrete pad, a stack of wood pallets was ablaze, the flames whipping around in a heavy wind. A student at the University of Maryland (UMD) would fly the Alta X drone all of about 25 meters to the fire. There it would drop the water balloon to extinguish the flames.
In the XPrize contest, drones must distinguish between dangerous fires—like this one—and legitimate campfires. Jayme Thornton
But, of course, it was complicated. The drone needed to hover at about 13.5 meters overhead, and the balloon was configured to detonate at a specific point in midair to ensure optimal water dispersal, as calculated by UMD’s Department of Fire Protection Engineering. On a signal, Andrés Felipe Rivas Bolivar, a doctoral student in aerospace engineering, launched the Alta X toward the fire. As a second, smaller drone outfitted with a thermal camera surveyed the scene from above, Rivas maneuvered the balloon-laden drone to the proper position. After about a half minute, he released the water bomb...and the balloon plummeted to the ground just wide of the platform, bursting with a thwaaaap.
On this warm but blustery day in mid-October, a team of about 20 UMD students and professors were gathered at a fire and rescue training center in La Plata, Md., to demonstrate the building blocks of what could be the future of wildfire fighting. They called their team Crossfire. Their guests were a handful of officials from the XPrize Foundation, which has organized a pair of competitions to vastly speed up wildfire detection and suppression. Twelve other teams are competing with Crossfire in the semifinals for the autonomous wildfire-suppression track of the competition. In the final round, to be held in June 2026, five of those teams will have to find a fire within 1,000 square kilometers of what XPrize calls “environmentally challenging” terrain and then navigate to and extinguish it, all within 10 minutes. The winner collects a US $3.5 million purse—and, hopefully, the world’s wildfire-fighting armies get a powerful new weapon for their arsenals.
Wildfires are growing more severe and affecting more people worldwide. The November 2018 Camp Fire that burned down 620 square kilometers of Northern California, including most of the town of Paradise, was the most deadly and destructive in the state’s recorded history, and it sent Pacific Gas and Electric, the giant utility responsible for starting the fire, into bankruptcy. XPrize had long been based in the Los Angeles area, so that catastrophe was undoubtedly on the minds of its staffers when they formulated the competition in 2019. “This was just something that was really personal and close to a lot of the individuals at the organization,” says Andrea Santy, program director for the wildfire competition. XPrize eventually organized a separate track of the competition to award $3.5 million for detecting small fires with satellites.
Andrea Santy, one of the program managers from XPrize in charge of the wildfire competition, looks on during Crossfire’s trials.Jayme Thornton
Santy says XPrize’s competition designers met with more than 100 experts in the field, including fire scientists, agency officials, and technologists—“all the experts that you would want at the table were at the table.” Where their views aligned, Santy says, XPrize researchers detected the “core problems.” One of the most important was response time. In the best case, an hour can often pass between when a fire is first detected and when it’s extinguished. XPrize aims to shrink that drastically. An additional $1 million will go to the teams that (per the rules) “successfully demonstrate accurate, precise, and rapid detection.”
Arnaud Trouvé, chair of the UMD’s Fire Protection Engineering department, thinks even the 10-minute limit may not be good enough. “On a red flag day with high-wind conditions, a fire that starts is going to be taking a big size within a matter of tens of seconds,” he said as we waited for the Alta X to try again. “So even the 10 minutes you have to go do something will be too slow.” Whatever comes from the XPrize, he says, will be adopted, but more likely in developed areas, where fires spread more slowly and could be extinguished early on, when firefighters are often busy evacuating residents.
In any event, the time limit pointed most teams—and all the teams to make the semifinals—toward drones. Firefighters have worked, or tried to work, given bureaucratic and other hurdles, with drones for years, but mainly for reconnaissance, says Bob Roper, a senior wildfire advisor for the Western Fire Chiefs Association. Many of the hurdles around using drones have been cleared, but no drone exists yet that can carry enough suppressant to be useful on its own, says Roper. (The smallest helicopter bucket carries 270 liters.) Roper says government-funded fire agencies seldom “have available unrestricted dollars to be able to develop something that’s new.” By sprinkling startups and universities with research funding, the XPrize is poised to make, he says, “a quantum leap difference.”
Word of the XPrize wildfire competition reached Trouvé’s desk soon after it launched in April 2023. He joined forces with colleagues in aerospace and mechanical engineering and with xFoundry, a new organization that uses competitions to spur entrepreneurship. (xFoundry’s founder, Amir Ansari, happened to be one of the sponsors of the first XPrize in 1994; his sister-in-law Anousheh is the CEO of the XPrize Foundation.) It didn’t take long to sketch out most of what they brought to La Plata.
The University of Maryland’s Yaseen Taha [right] pilots a spotter drone while Brian Tran looks on. Jayme Thornton
The day began with tests of the detection drone. Its dock opened like flower petals unfolding and the drone, a much smaller quadcopter than the Alta X, shot up into the air. Using a handheld controller, undergraduate Yaseen Taha flew it to a point 35 meters above the burning pallets. Like all the technology Crossfire has deployed, the scout was an off-the-shelf model, made by the Chinese manufacturer DJI. It came with a lot of important features already programmed in, including obstacle avoidance and lidar, and cost just $25,000, according to xFoundry head of products and ventures Phillip Alvarez. “We get a really nice, well-polished system for a pretty low price here, and then we can spend the rest of development on solving the hard stuff,” he said. In total, Crossfire has spent around $300,000, most of it raised from UMD donors, he added.
xFoundry’s Philip Alvarez stands behind the Crossfire team’s drone that’s used for detecting wildfires. Jayme Thornton
The hard stuff, some of it anyway, was visible on a large display monitor showing the feeds from the drone’s two cameras. On the right was the infrared feed; on it, a red square labeled “fire” bracketed the burning pallets. A smaller red fire square appeared up and to the right of this; this was a pile of glowing embers in a bin not far away. These were meant to represent a campfire—the contest rules required systems to distinguish between potentially destructive conflagrations and “decoy fires” that don’t pose a threat. Crossfire’s system made those distinctions based on the drone’s color video feed. That feed runs through an open-source deep learning model known as YOLO (“You Only Look Once”), which recognizes images.
One of Crossfire’s drones scans the terrain and distinguishes between a burning pile of pallets and a small fire in a bin. Robb Mandelbaum
To train it, UMD students fed 40,000 photographs of fires to the model—manually identifying the blazes in about 1,200 of these. The result was that when the program processed the color feed from the drone, it concluded that pallets were a fire, marked on the screen in a blue box, and ignored the bin. Now both camera feeds indicated a blaze in the same place, and the monitor threw up a warning in red: “FIRE DETECTED.” As turkey vultures looked on from high above, the drone identified the fire again from a higher altitude, then with the cameras pointed at a different angle, it finally flew a preprogrammed back-and-forth route through the air that looks like a lawnmower’s path.
An electric Ford F150 truck serves as charger and home base for Crossfire’s system. Jayme Thornton
An electric Ford F-150 pickup, front trunk open, sat off to the side powering a bank of computers that operate the two drones. In the field, it will also process feeds from cameras mounted on poles throughout the forest—an early detection system that will trigger the scouting drone. This was designed by Alvarez, who happens to have a Ph.D. in biophysics, using an even newer version of image-reading AI developed just last year.
All of the teams, Santy says, have proposed something broadly similar: sensors and cameras on the ground or on one or more drones, or both, and AI interpreting the data. How teams get to the fire has been driven by regulation—the FAA has restrictions on drones weighing more than 25 kilograms (55 pounds), as well as autonomous systems dropping payloads, which is why Rivas had to pilot the Alta X. “Some are looking at how we can address the problem within the current regulations, so they’re trying to stay within the 55 pounds,” says Santy. Others are designing systems that ultimately could be deployed only under new regulations. That primarily comes down to either using a swarm of smaller drones or one heavy-lift drone. Teams that fly heavy in the finals will have to get FAA approval for the contest, just as Crossfire would need it to operate the Alta X autonomously.
Crossfire’s fire-suppression drone flies toward a fire carrying a balloon full of water. Jayme Thornton
Curiously, the XPrize appears not to have spurred much innovation in actually putting out a fire. Most teams are using water, though they’re dropping it in a variety of different ways. It’s a work in progress, says Santy. “Teams have been thinking very hard about what works under challenging conditions” like wind, drone movement, and proximity to the fire.
The University of Maryland’s Dahlia Andres works on the Crossfire team’s fire-suppression drone.Jayme Thornton
Crossfire’s approach of detonating water balloons in midair—which has yet to be patented so the team would not describe it in detail—could eventually change the calculation about how much suppressant is needed to fight fires. Typically, aircraft flying at high altitude release a lot of water, which, says Trouvé, mostly misses the burning biomass. “Releasing the water at low elevations and directly above the burning biomass requires much less water,” he says.
With a new balloon installed on the Alta X, the team attempted to attack the fire a second time. This time, Rivas spent several minutes maneuvering the drone to get it in place before dropping the balloon, which appeared to partially detonate, spewing water as it fell. The balloon didn’t completely burst until it hit the platform, spraying water all over and creating a huge puff of steam. But when the smoke cleared, the fire still burned. Crossfire’s detonators, it turned out, were rated for warmer weather than this October day. “We’ve tested this probably 20 different times, and 20 different times it’s been successful,” Alvarez said ruefully.
Crossfire’s drone carries a water balloon skyward, finds the fire, and drops the balloon. Jayme Thornton
But the third attempt, several hours later, was the charm. Rivas whisked the Alta X over the fire. Taha, on the other side of the fire, checked its position and motioned for release. The balloon exploded a few meters below the drone, and a shower of water blanketed the fire. The thermal camera on the observation drone confirmed the fire had been extinguished. Muted “yays” and a smattering of applause broke out.
Crossfire’s Abdullah Shamsan, Derek Paley, Matthew Ayd, and Joshua Gaus [from left] monitor a drone flight. Jayme Thornton
Crossfire is already looking beyond the competition, regardless of whether it makes it to the finals in 2026. Along with Taha, aerospace engineering professor Derek Paley has talked to some 40 potential customers—mainly fire departments and government agencies—for the system Crossfire is developing. He’s currently uncertain whether there are enough organizations willing to adopt the technology to make it commercially viable. So far, he says, “it’s a little bit of an uphill battle, but we’re hoping with the visibility brought to the problem by XPrize” and the momentum of being a finalist—and, better still, some prize money in hand—“we’ll have enough to have a compelling business model.”
Roper, of the Western Fire Chiefs Association, acknowledges that “political considerations” around existing fleets of crewed aircraft will challenge the transition to drones, but he says that these can gain a foothold by operating when and where crewed aircraft can’t, at night, for example. Still, it will take multiple companies commercializing the technology to prod fire departments to purchase drones. Even then, he says, “it’s probably going to have to be adopted either at the federal or the state level first and then there’s a trickle-down effect to the local fire departments.”
If not, Paley says, “our tech is applicable to law enforcement, and other aspects of public safety. It’s just a question of, are we starting a wildfire company, or are we starting a robotics company.”
2025-12-23 22:00:02
IEEE Spectrum’s transportation coverage this year covered breakthroughs in electric vehicles, batteries, charging, automation, aviation, maritime tech and more. Readers followed the race to rebuild U.S. magnet manufacturing, rethink EV-charging architecture, and reinvent automotive software. They tracked China’s sprint toward five-minute charging, the rise of high-power home chargers, and the push to automate airports. Our most-read stories also explored next-generation navigation, zero-carbon shipping fuels, record-size electric vessels, and early road tests of solid-state batteries. Read on for our roundup of the transportation stories published in 2025 that readers found most compelling.
Business Wire
The most-visited transportation post of the year focused on the United States’s efforts to rebuild a domestic supply of neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets—critical components for EVs, wind turbines, HVAC systems, and many military systems. MP Materials has begun trial production at its new Texas plant, with plans to ramp up to between 1,000 and 3,000 tonnes per year and supply companies like General Motors. Other U.S. projects from e-VAC Magnetics, Noveon, USA Rare Earth, and Quadrant are also emerging.
But these efforts are dwarfed by China’s rare earths industry: China makes 85 to 90 percent of NdFeB magnets and 97 percent of the underlying rare earth metals, with individual Chinese firms producing tens of thousands of tonnes—far more than all non-Chinese plants combined. China also has massive unused refinement and production capacity, keeping global prices low.
MP Materials’ unique mine-to-magnet strategy could offer intelligence and supply-chain resilience, but competing with China’s subsidies and scale will be extremely difficult. The U.S. Department of Defense may pay a premium for “friendly-nation” magnets, but cost-obsessed automakers like GM might resist higher domestic prices.
Jim West/REA/Redux
A strong public EV-charging network is essential for mass electric-vehicle adoption, especially for drivers who can’t reliably charge at home. Yet today’s fast-charging stations are expensive and complex largely because of one feature: galvanic isolation—the transformer-based safety barrier that protects against electric shock when ground connections fail. This isolation hardware accounts for roughly 60 percent of charger power-electronics cost and about half of power losses, making fast chargers costly to build and maintain. The authors of this piece—veterans of AC Propulsion, whose early technology influenced the Tesla Roadster—argue that galvanic isolation is no longer necessary.
The authors propose a new approach they call direct power conversion (DPC): eliminate the isolation link entirely and replace it with: (1) a double-ground system with ground-continuity detection to prevent shock hazards, and (2) a buck regulator to handle voltage mismatches between the grid and the EV battery. Removing isolation would simplify chargers from four power-conversion stages to just one (plus a buck regulator if needed). This could cut charger hardware costs by more than half, improve efficiency by 2–3percent, enable much cheaper fast-charging stations, allow EV onboard chargers to become powerful enough for Level 3 charging, and accelerate expansion of public charging infrastructure.The authors argue that simplifying chargers—and shedding old assumptions about galvanic isolation—is the fastest path to an affordable and reliable EV-charging network, which is critical to broad EV adoption.
BYD
BYD has unleashed megawatt-class EV charging in China, delivering 400 kilometers of range in five minutes—triple the power (and thus triple the speed) of today’s best U.S. setups. A Han L sedan briefly hit 1,002 kilowatts on BYD’s new 1,000-volt platform, which uses 1,500-V silicon-carbide chips and redesigned lithium iron phosphate batteries to enable safe, ultrafast charging. BYD’s vertically integrated approach—building cars, batteries, and chargers—lets it scale quickly and keep prices low. The company has already deployed 500 megachargers and plans 4,000 more, pushing China far ahead as rivals like Huawei and Zeekr race to match speeds up to 1,500 kW.China makes 85 to 90 percent of NdFeB magnets and 97 percent of the underlying rare earth metals, with individual Chinese firms producing tens of thousands of tonnes—far more than all non-Chinese plants combined.
ChargePoint
MCKIBILLO
Airports are rolling out a wave of new automation to speed trips from curb to gate. Copenhagen Optimization’s Virtual Queuing lets travelers reserve security times, with machine-learning models adjusting slots and staffing in real time. Electronic Bagtags generate paperless luggage tags via NFC, while Idemia’s biometric systems verify identity with a quick face scan. Smiths Detection’s X-ray diffraction machines identify materials by molecular “fingerprint,” reducing false alarms. Amazon’s Just Walk Out shops enable cashierless purchases, and Avidbots’ Neo robots autonomously scrub terminal floors. Even boarding gets smarter with systems that flag passengers trying to jump the queue.Removing galvanic isolation could simplify chargers from four power-conversion stages to just one. This could cut charger hardware costs by more than half, improve efficiency by 2–3percent, and enable much cheaper fast-charging stations.
2025-12-23 21:00:01
The goal of the quantum-computing industry is to build a powerful, functional machine capable of solving large-scale problems in science and industry that classical computing can’t solve. We won’t get there in 2026. In fact, scientists have been working toward that goal since at least the 1980s, and it has proved difficult, to say the least.
“If someone says quantum computers are commercially useful today, I say I want to have what they’re having,” said Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer of the quantum-computing startup QuEra, on stage at the Q+AI conference in New York City in October.
Because the goal is so lofty, tracking its progress has also been difficult. To help chart a course toward truly transformative quantum technology and mark milestones along the path, the team at Microsoft Quantum has come up with a new framework.
This framework lays out three levels of quantum-computing progress. The first level includes the kinds of machines we have today: the so-called noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. These computers are made up of roughly 1,000 quantum bits, or qubits, but are noisy and error prone. The second level consists of small machines that implement one of many protocols that can robustly detect and correct qubit errors. The third and final level represents a large-scale version of those error-corrected machines, containing hundreds of thousands or even millions of qubits and capable of millions of quantum operations, with high fidelity.
If you accept this framework, 2026 is slated to be the year when customers can finally get their hands on level-two quantum computers. “We feel very excited about the year 2026, because lots of work that happened over the last so many years is coming to fruition now,” says Srinivas Prasad Sugasani, vice president of quantum at Microsoft.
Microsoft, in collaboration with the startup Atom Computing, plans to deliver an error-corrected quantum computer to the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. “This machine should be utilized toward establishing a scientific advantage—not a commercial advantage yet, but that’s the path forward,” Sugasani says.
QuEra has also delivered a quantum machine ready for error correction to Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and plans to make it available to global customers in 2026.
Arguably, the main trouble with today’s quantum computers is their propensity for noise. Quantum bits are inherently fragile and thus sensitive to all kinds of environmental factors, such as electric or magnetic fields, mechanical vibrations, or even cosmic rays. Some have argued that even noisy quantum machines can be useful, but almost everyone agrees that for truly transformative applications, quantum computers will need to become error resilient.
To make classical information robust against errors, one can simply repeat it. Say you want to send a 0 bit along a noisy channel. That 0 might get flipped to a 1 along the way, causing a miscommunication. But if you instead send three zeros in a row, it will still be obvious that you were trying to send a 0 even if one gets flipped.
Simple repetition does not work with qubits, because they cannot be copied and pasted. But there are still ways to encode the information contained in a single qubit onto many physical qubits, making it more resilient. These groups of physical qubits encoding one qubit’s worth of information are known as logical qubits. Once information is encoded in these logical qubits, as the computation proceeds and errors occur, error-correction algorithms can then tease apart what mistakes were made and what the original information was.
Just creating these logical qubits is not enough—it’s important to experimentally verify that encoding information in logical qubits leads to lower error rates and better computation. Back in 2023, the team at QuEra, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Maryland, showed that quantum operations carried out with logical qubits outperformed those done with bare physical qubits. The Microsoft and Atom Computing team managed the same feat in 2024.
This year, these scientific advances will reach customers. The machine that Microsoft and Atom Computing will be delivering, called Magne, will have 50 logical qubits, built from some 1,200 physical qubits, and should be operational by the start of 2027. QuEra’s machine at AIST has around 37 logical qubits (depending on implementation) and 260 physical qubits, Boger says.
It may be no coincidence that both of the level-two quantum computers will be built out of the same types of qubits: neutral atoms. While the classical computing world has long since settled on the transistor as the fundamental device of choice, the quantum-computing world has yet to pick the perfect qubit, be it a superconductor (pursued at IBM, Google, and others), a photon (used by the likes of PsiQuantum and Xanadu), an ion (developed by IonQ and Quantinuum, to name a few), or other.
All of these options have their advantages and disadvantages, but there is a reason some of the earliest error-corrected machines are built with neutral atoms. The physical qubits that make up a logical qubit need to be close to each other, or connected in some way, in order to share information. Unlike, say, superconducting qubits printed on a chip, any two atomic qubits can be brought right next to each other (an advantage shared by trapped ions).
“Neutral atoms can be moved around,” says QuEra’s Boger. “That allows us to build error-correction methods that are just not possible with static qubits.”
A neutral-atom quantum computer consists of a vacuum chamber. Inside the chamber, a gas of atoms is cooled to just above absolute zero. Then, individual atoms are captured, held, and even moved around by tightly focused laser beams in a technique known as optical tweezing. Each atom is a single physical qubit, and these qubits can be arranged in a 2D or even 3D array.
Neutral-atom quantum computers consist of individual atoms that are manipulated and controlled primarily by lasers. Complex optical setups guide the laser beams to their precise destinations. Atom Computing
The computation itself—the sequence of “quantum gates”—is performed by shining a separate laser at the atoms, illuminating them in a precisely orchestrated fashion. In addition to maneuverability, the neutral-atom approach offers parallelism: The same laser pulse can illuminate many pairs of atoms at once, performing the same operation on each pair simultaneously.
The main downside of neutral-atom qubits is they are a bit slow. Computations on atomic systems are about one-hundredth to one-thousandth as fast as their superconducting counterparts, says Jerry Chow, director of quantum systems at IBM Quantum.
However, Boger argues that this slowdown can be compensated for. “Because of the unique capabilities of neutral atoms, we have shown that we can create a 50x or 100x speedup over what previously was thought,” he says, referring to recent work at QuEra in collaboration with Harvard and Yale. “We think that when you compare what some people call time to solution, not just clock speed but how long it would take you to get to that useful result…that neutral atoms today are comparable to superconducting qubits.” Even though each operation is slow, more operations are done in parallel and fewer operations are needed for error correction, allowing for the speedup.
Microsoft’s three-level framing is not accepted by everyone in the industry.
“I think that kind of level framing…is a very physics-device-oriented view of the world, and we should be looking at it more from a computational view of the world, which is, what can you actually use these circuits for and enable?” says IBM’s Chow.
Chow argues that, although a large error-corrected machine is the ultimate goal, it doesn’t mean error correction must be implemented first. Instead, the team at IBM is focusing on finding use cases for existing machines and using other error-suppressing strategies along the way, while also working toward a fully error-corrected machine in 2029.
Whether or not you accept the framing, the teams at QuEra, Microsoft, and Atom Computing are optimistic about the neutral-atom approach’s potential to reach large-scale devices. “If there’s one word, it’s scalability. That’s the key benefit of neutral atoms,” says Justin Ging, chief product officer at Atom Computing.
Both the teams at QuEra and Atom Computing say they expect to be able to put 100,000 atoms into a single vacuum chamber within the next few years, setting a clear path toward that third level of quantum computing.
This article appears in the January 2026 print issue.