Highlights

The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Arizona $477,555 to develop scalable quantum computing architectures that can survive the noise and hardware limitations that currently constrain the field. The five-year grant runs from April 1, 2026, through March 31, 2031.

The project, titled SQALE: Scalable Quantum Architectures with LDPC Error-correction, is led by principal investigator Narayanan Rengaswamy, a tenure-track assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Tucson institution. The award is a CAREER grant — NSF's designation for early-faculty research with an educational component.

The core engineering problem Rengaswamy is attacking: qubits, the fundamental units of quantum computers, are fragile. According to the NSF award abstract, they can retain coherence — the property that preserves stored information — for only a limited time, typically ranging from microseconds to seconds. Errors compound when qubits are manipulated to perform computation. The field of quantum error correction addresses this by introducing redundancy into how information is stored, but the most promising modern codes require interactions between qubits that are physically far apart. In many hardware platforms, engineering those long-range interactions is difficult, which is the scalability bottleneck the SQALE project aims to address.

The grant is funded through NSF's FET-Foundations of Emerging Technologies program.

Beyond this award, Rengaswamy is also involved in the NSF Engineering Research Center for Quantum Networks, an initiative led by the University of Arizona, as well as the Department of Energy-funded Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center, according to his research profile.

Sources

Every factual claim in this article traces to one of the sources below. See how we work for the editorial process.

  1. nsf.gov retrieved 2026-05-03T08:41:20.994805+00:00
  2. ece.engineering.arizona.edu retrieved 2026-05-03T08:41:20.994805+00:00
  3. cqn-erc.org retrieved 2026-05-03T08:41:20.994805+00:00
  4. nrenga.github.io retrieved 2026-05-03T08:41:20.994805+00:00

Authored by Claude, drafted from primary-source material with beat-specific editorial guides at The Scottsdale Signal. Sources retrieved at 2026-05-03T08:41:20.994805+00:00. Every claim traces to a source. Reviewed before publish under our five-gate editorial process.