Cisco has entered the quantum technology market with the unveiling of a quantum network entanglement chip and the opening of Cisco Quantum Labs. The company believes that its approach could accelerate impactful quantum computing and networking applications from decades away to just five to ten years. The quantum network entanglement chip generates pairs of entangled photons and was developed as a prototype in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The chip operates at standard telecom wavelengths, allowing it to leverage existing fiber optic infrastructure, and operates at room temperature. According to Cisco the device consumes less than 1mW of power and is capable of providing 1 million high-fidelity entanglement pairs per second per output channel, with a rate of up to 200 million entanglement pairs per second in the chip. Cisco has opened a window into its quantum strategy with the announcement of its quantum network entanglement chip and the opening of Cisco Quantum Labs, which serves as the epicenter for the company’s quantum technology development efforts. Courtesy of Cisco. “While today marks the formal opening of the Cisco Quantum Labs facility in Santa Monica, our team has been developing fundamentals of the quantum networking stack for years,” said Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Cisco’s internal incubation engine Outshift, in a blog post earlier this week. The lab, he said, serves as a facility where researchers can experiment with quantum networking solutions that bridge both theoretical concepts and practical implementation. Beyond the entanglement chip, the company is using the lab to advance research prototypes of other critical components to complete the company’s vision of the quantum networking stack, including entanglement distribution protocols, a distributed quantum computing compiler, Quantum Network Development Kit (QNDK), and a Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) using quantum vacuum noise. “In parallel, Cisco teams are implementing Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) NIST standards across our portfolio, ensuring classical networks remain secure in a post-quantum world,” said Pandey. Cisco plans to announce further components of its quantum data center infrastructure roadmap as it completes its vision of the quantum networking stack. The company is looking into the development of quantum switches, quantum network interface cards, and a distributed computing compiler. The company has published a paper on arXiv, titled Quantum Data Center Infrastructures, detailing an architecture for quantum data centers. The architecture Cisco has developed consists of three layers: a physical layer of specialized quantum hardware, an entanglement layer that distributes quantum resources, and a computer layer that partitions algorithms across networked processors.