Client Spotlight: D-Wave Systems Inc.

This month’s Seed IP client spotlight is focused on D-Wave Systems Inc. (The Quantum Computing Company™), a privately-held, Canadian company that is also recognized as the world’s first quantum computing company. D-Wave integrates new discoveries in physics, engineering, manufacturing, and computer science into breakthrough approaches to computation that help solve some of the world’s most complex challenges. They specialize in building quantum processors, which operate at .8 degrees Kelvin (i.e., almost absolute 0) colder than -458 degrees Fahrenheit.

D-Wave was founded in 1999 with the goal of making practical quantum computing a reality. For 5 years the company worked to gather intellectual property and ideas on how quantum computing might be accomplished. Unlike academic research projects, the focus was on how quantum computers could be designed, manufactured, and scaled. Key insights about how such a system could be built led to the decision to utilize and advance superconducting technology as the basis of the quantum computer.

D-Wave built its own fabrication facility – a superconducting electronics foundry – to produce the processors required to use quantum effects to compute. They assembled a team of scientists to design, fabricate, and test the processors in our own in-house labs.

In 2010, D-Wave released its first commercial system, the D-Wave One™ quantum computer. They have doubled the number of qubits each year, and in 2013 they shipped our 512-qubit D-Wave Two™ system. Their work has been peer-reviewed in prestigious publications, for instance Nature.

Today, D-Wave is the recognized leader in the development, fabrication, and integration of superconducting quantum computers. Their systems are being used by world-class organizations and institutions including Lockheed-Martin, Google, NASA, and USC. D-Wave has been granted over 100 U.S. patents and has published over 70 peer-reviewed papers in leading scientific journals.

D-Wave has a patent portfolio ranked No. 4 worldwide in the Computer Systems category by IEEE Spectrum in year 2012. (Link to article)

With the quantum computer built there is a lot more to be done. D-Wave is currently developing different layers of software to make the systems easier to use and more accessible to users.

Quantum computing has the potential to help solve some of the most complex technical, commercial, scientific, and national defense problems that organizations face. It is expected that quantum computing will lead to breakthroughs in science, engineering, modeling and simulation, financial analysis, optimization, logistics, machine learning, pattern recognition and anomaly detection, bioinformatics, and national defense applications.

D-Wave Systems Inc. is headquartered in Burnaby, British Columbia with additional offices in Palo Alto, California and Washington, DC. Tanya Rothe is General Counsel and Director of Intellectual Property of D-Wave Systems Inc.

Seed IP Law Group is proud of its longstanding business relationship with D-Wave Systems Inc. and Tanya Rothe.

Official website for D-Wave Systems Inc.