IBM has signed a definitive agreement to acquire HRL Laboratories, a historic research institution with nearly 80 years of scientific contributions. The acquisition aims to accelerate IBM's quantum computing vision by integrating HRL's advanced expertise in silicon-spin qubit engineering.

  • HRL is famous for inventing the laser in 1960 and developing the self-aligned gate process for MOS field-effect transistors in 1965, which underlies modern integrated circuits.
  • The lab pioneered autonomous navigation software in 1984 and has researched ion propulsion since the early 1960s.
  • Recent HRL achievements include swarm robotics research, ultralight metallic microlattices, artificial synapses using memristors, and a silicon quantum processing unit comprising 56 quantum dots as 18 qubits.

IBM states that combining HRL's legacy with its own research will help scale powerful quantum computers and advance hardware and fundamental science.