Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Hi everyone, my name is Dolly Sheeta. Welcome to Quantum Ecosystem Conversations, a series dedicated to exploring the people, technologies, companies, investments, policies, and partnerships shaping the future of global quantum ecosystem. When most people hear the words quantum computing, they think about qubits, revolutionary algorithms, and futuristic quantum computers capable of solving problems beyond the reach of today's most powerful supercomputers. Those breakthroughs are certainly exciting, but behind every quantum processor is an enormous engineering effort that often gets unnoticed. Every quantum computer depends on a sophisticated network of enabling technologies, advanced materials, semiconductor manufacturing, cryogenic refrigeration, microwave electronics, photonics. and specialized interconnects. These technologies may not receive the same attention as quantum processors themselves, but without them scalable quantum computing simply would not be possible. Today's conversation shines a light on one of those essential technologies. As superconducting quantum computers continue to grow from hundreds towards thousands and eventually millions of qubits, one engineering challenge is becoming increasingly important. How do we deliver signals to an environment that operates only fractions of degrees above absolute zero? How do we minimize Electrical loss and interference while allowing these systems to become larger and more reliable. These questions have made superconducting interconnects one of the critical hardware challenges facing the quantum industry today. Our guest is helping develop solutions to those challenges. Dr. Gregory Nielsen has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of microfabrication, microsystems engineering, and emerging technologies. He earned his bachelor's degree from Utah State University before completing both his master's and PhD in micro and nanotechnologies At MIT. Following graduate school, Greg was selected as a Harry Truman Fellow at Sandia National Labs, one of the nation's premier research laboratories, where he later became a member of the technical staff. Greg later served as a chief scientist at Webin Solar before founding Ningsen Scientific in 2017 With the goal of advancing microfabrication beyond the limitations of conventional manufacturing. Today, his team develops superconducting flex cables designed to support applications ranging from quantum computing to semiconductor manufacturing, advanced sensing, medical technologies, Beyond the technology itself, Greg's entrepreneurial journey is equally remarkable. Nielsen Scientific has grown by combining innovation. With strategic partnerships, university collaborations, and competitive federal research funding, demonstrating how a small deep tech company can contribute to technologies of national and global importance. Today's conversation is about much more than superconducting cables. It's about what it takes to build a breakthrough hardware. It's about commercializing advanced research. It's about entrepreneurship. And it's about strengthening the quantum ecosystem. So let's begin. Today's guest is Gregory Nielsen, founder and CEO of Nielsen Scientific. Greg is an engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, and advanced technology innovator whose career spans world class research institutions, national laboratories, renewable energy, semiconductor technologies, and advanced manufacturing. After earning both his master's and PhD in micro and nanotechnology from MIT, Greg joined Sandia National Labs as a Harry Truman Fellow and later became a member of the technical staff, where he developed advanced microsystems for a wide range of applications. He later served as chief scientist at Wiven Solar before founding Nielsen Scientific, where he and his team continued to push the boundaries of advanced microfabrication and superconducting hardware. for next generation technologies. Greg, welcome to Quantum Ecosystem Conversations. It's a pleasure to have you with us today.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, thanks, Darley. It's nice to visit with you today.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. Greg, let's begin with your journey. Can you give us a background about yourself, your education in detail?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: as you mentioned, my background is in, micro and nano systems and nanotechnology. done a lot of work in optics and a lot of combining optics with microfabrication, optical mems, that kind of thing, optical electronics. started working in this area in in graduate school back back in Boston at MIT my thesis was MEMS devices with silicon photonics, so waveguides on a chip. This was back during fiber optic bubble background, 2000. And and so there's a lot of interest in that. And so we were doing some interesting things and building some really cool stuff and and was lucky to be part of a part of a really Great research group, great advisor, and really worked with quite a few professors. And it was it was a neat experience. from there I went to Sandia Labs. I was a Truman Fellow, which is this is a great opportunity to to they give you three years of funding to pursue kind of whatever you want. And that was that was pretty unique. so I was doing some work for very advanced. High-speed MEMS switching, primarily for And actually, this was the very first time that I proposed something that was quantum related. But back then, in those early days at Sandia, we wound up working with some colleagues at Sandia and David Weineland on a proposal for doing MEMS switching for iron-trapped qubits. it wasn't funded, unfortunately, real foray into quantum related technology. But but I worked at Sandy Labs for 11 years, inertial sensing, navigation For GPS denied areas, for example, also worked in silicon photonics for various applications. did a lot of work in optoelectronics, applying microsystem ideas to solar cells. and there were some unique advantages there. built a big program in that, worked with a lot of people in Sandia, outside of Sandia National Labs Universities, and ultimately wound up deciding to take entrepreneurial leave from Sandia to start a company to commercialize those solar technologies. One of my passions, I suppose you can say, is is solving really difficult problems, these deep tech problems. And and solving it mean to me, means more than just writing a paper, more than just submitting patents to the patent office or whatever. It's actually bringing that solution to people who can use it and need it in in in a way they can like implement it into their systems. things were going really well for me at Sandita, but but really for me personally I felt like I needed to take that next step. And so we launched this company Empower Technology and and it's doing pretty well actually although I left shortly after founding the company for personal reasons ultimately became the chief scientist at Viven Solar. which was great. There's a lot of great experiences, opportunities there, but ultimately wanted to get back into some of the deeper tech problems and and solutions was drawn to that. 2017-2018 time frame launched Nielsen Scientific so we've done that and developed some additional kind of related proprietary fabrication techniques, and we've been applying those techniques to various challenging technologies and and problems technical problems that that are needed and one of one of which of course is our high density super flux cables which address a critical need in quantum computing and we're really excited about that one actually we're we're doing some really really great work
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So when you founded Nielsen Scientific, what was your primary vision for the company? Did you start off working on the superconducting flex cables back then?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: no. So the the primary goal was really around that three-dimensional microfabrication capability. Having worked in in microsystems for a long time, and and designed a lot of systems and gone through the fabrication of them, microfabrication relies on photolithography and and that's grown up around integrated circuits, silicon integrated circuits and they're I mean fantastic, amazing, amazing technology. But what that what photolithography is is really a two-dimensional image on a flat surface. And and so when you design things with that with photolithography as the basis of your your fabrication technique, it means that that you're basically making a two-dimensional structure that you extrude extrude into the third dimension. So it's it's a limited three-dimensional structure, really like extruded 2Ds is what people kind of refer to it as. And and that's fine. I mean, you can do some really amazing stuff with that, but but it occurred to me, I mean, a long time ago, when I was designing a really complicated VEMS device, that man, if you could do something three-dimensional, full full freedom to to fabricate something three-dimensional. you could do some amazing stuff in the micro realm. And and that was what what was the goal is to develop that technology. when we first started, it was just a a concept, we can make structures that nobody else in the world can make because of our our capabilities.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: It's amazing. is there a competitor for you right now? adjacent technology?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: an adjacent technology to that would probably be a what's called two-photon polymerization. And this is a technology that I think the first company that really had a tool is a company called Nanoscribe that came out of Europe. And they've done some great stuff. but what they are doing is they're making three-dimensional microstructures, nanostructures even, submicron in polymers and these are like photo definable polymers they can make some pretty cool stuff and it's impressive. however everything they do it depends on the photo definable nature of the polymers they're working in. So they can only make these three-dimensional microstructures in polymeric materials. that has its place and it's very useful in some respects but You know, but sometimes you want materials that have better mechanical properties than polymers or or different electrical properties or optical properties or whatever. And so what we've developed is a capability to make those kinds of microstructures, three three-dimensional microstructures in high quality single crystal semiconductor materials like silicon or silicon carbide or diamond or gallium arsenide, gallium nitride, whatever you want. It is a technique that relies on the semiconductor properties of the material. And so it is semiconductor based, but but those materials are amazing.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So for those who are unfamiliar with Nielsen Scientific, what problems or the problem statements are you solving today and what makes your techniques unique?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So our techniques allow us to make things that that are hard to make otherwise. And while we have this capability for three-dimensional structures, it's semiconductors, what we found is that the same tool has the ability to do some interesting fabrication techniques that that are a little unusual And things came up with our superconducting flux case. So I ran into a a researcher from Brookhaven National Lab presenting some stuff related to our three dimensional fabrication, and she asked us if we could do something to make these metamaterial filters for terahertz optics and and it looked like something we could do. So we looked into it and sure enough that was something that our our capabilities could could do. we try to solve problems for people, and so when we talk to people, they have these technical problems that that that they don't have a solution for. Don't know the technology, they don't have the technology, or they don't have a way to make the structure that they need to solve their problem. And so we we try to be very customer focused in that respect, really pay attention to what our customers say and what they need, and then try to solve those problems for them. this led us to this researcher in Brookhaven. She introduced us to some people at Case Western. great partnership there. And they they referred us to some people at Slack who needed a high-density superconducting flex cable for a telescope system they were developing. that was about five years ago, and we developed these high-density superconducting flex cables. Well, as it turns out, that that solution for these telescopes that that had these bolometer arrays in cryogenic systems actually addresses a really important need in quantum computing. And and so we've been working with now partners to address this challenge that they have. And so I I think this is actually an important lesson is that that in business of any sort, whether it's deep tech or whatever, listening really carefully to your to your customers. They have needs. You know, there's things, there's pain points, there's things that are keeping them up at night. how in the world am I going to connect interconnect all of these qubits that we have planned in our roadmap, for example, and and and then, if you listen carefully to your customers, you can solve their pain points. they love it. And and that's that's what we love doing. So
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Right. it's it's an excellent point. Basically, you're not pushing your solution onto the customers. You are scouting for problem statements from them, and then essentially coming coming up with a developing a solution and later s looking at what are the other adjacent fields that could be applied for, right? Most often in research fields. you come up with a solution and try to force fit it into different unoptimized or a mismatched problem statement. And I think great great point that you just talked about, Greg. So for for viewers who might be very new to quantum hardware, what are superconducting flex cables? Why are they important and what role do they play inside a superconducting quantum computer?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, well that's a great question. So let me this probably is a good time to show a few images. So so this shows a picture here. This is a an image from Google from their this is one of their quantum computers that they built over the last few years. And I mean, it's a very sciencey looking picture bit of work. let me kind of describe what you're seeing here. So right down here, at the bottom, this is the coldest part of the quantum computer. And this part, this whole system, it goes down into a vacuum chamber and then it's cooled to very low temperatures. And each layer here is a different temperature stage. And right down here, it's kind of buried in all these wires and stuff is is the quantum chip. And this is where the superconducting qubits exist. multiple qubits there. And and that's that's where the computation occurs. But if you look up here, obviously there's a lot more structure going on. And what you see is all of these wires. And these wires, especially down here in the lower temperature regions from about, probably this stage on down, are all superconducting coax cables. And there are thousands of them. I mean, you thousands of these cables and and these are not, these aren't your run-of-the-mill cables that you use to connect up your TV to your caber. they are coax cable in that sense, but they are actually superconductive. So these cables are pretty expensive. manufactured anywhere from like $2,000 up to $7,000 each. And so when you get thousands of these, this winds up being a very costly system to make. so you have to bring those signals down to the qubit and then back out of the refrigerator to a classical computing chip to interpret what's going on in the in the qubits and to control them. So the bulk of this really is these kinds of wires. Quantum computer is really impressive. You can do some really amazing things. But the problem is these individual single-channel coax cables are not scalable to the numbers of qubits that people need to get to to have a fully functional, high power quantum computer. They need a different solution. And that solution doesn't fully exist yet, and but But that's what we're addressing is this wiring problem of getting the signals from kind of the room temperature, classical computing systems down to the qubits and then back out again. And as that scales up, all of that needs to be integrated. And that's what we're working. That's the problem solving.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: you said single qubit would be needing three to five of these cables, is that correct?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, and it's three to five cables for each stage, each temperature stage. So it it really kind of expands out from there.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So based on the current architecture, what is the maximum amount of qubits that a quantum computer is able to offer.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, that's a good question. It actually comes down to the cooling power of the system. And and what what is what is at issue here is is each of these wires, it actually brings in a certain amount of heat from the outside world down to the quantum chip. Now the quantum chip needs to be 10 to 20 millikelvin, so very, very, very cold. But at that low of a temperature, there's a limited Amount heat that you can pull out, that you can reject out of the system. And so what happens is because these each of these cables has sort of a certain cross-section area, each cable brings down a certain amount of heat, and all of that heat needs to be pulled out. Now exactly the number of of qubits that can be accommodated is a little bit dependent on the on the refrigeration system and how big and complicated that is. But but it's clear that That the cross-section area of these of these coax cables is just too large to scale up beyond much beyond where where people are at. It also depends a little bit on the quantum error correction that people are doing. So, like one logical qubit is actually a combination of multiple qubits. And it depends on how many physical qubits you need to represent a a logical qubit. So it's kind of a complicated question, but Like the fundamental issue is how much heat is coming into the system and how much is you're rejecting. And then, some aspects of the qubits themselves. the cross section area of each of each wire holds down a certain amount of heat. And so to solve this problem, it's not just a matter of integrating all these cables into a single cable. It's also reducing the cross-section area and using techniques that reduce the amount of heat transfer going down the cable.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: if the performance of the qubit remains untouched or unaltered during this process, then you could have zero error that can translate to, for example, thousand qubits. Let's just take thousand physical qubits is equal to one logical qubit. It's just an equivalency I'm doing. But then it would be linear that way, right? Without if there was no error in the system. Am I reading that right?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, I mean that's that's one tech technique of of fault tolerance for quantum computing is is is aggregating a number of qubits to represent one. that is especially superconducting qubits where it's relatively easy to make multiple qubits, that's that's the route they're going. it's usually not a thousand to one, but it's but it's many, it's tens at least, maybe a hundred to one, depending on the
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: these cables were developed in a different field or for a different application when they were putting this quantum computer together almost a decade ago. what can you talk a bit about that technology that was adopted to to build the quantum computers? this one, the the legacy one.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, yeah. So, like these this quantum computer here and and essentially all of the quantum computers have been almost like science projects, like hero projects, like like we want to demonstrate that this has a path forward, that it that it works, that we can bring together, a certain number of qubits and we can do a quantum calculation. And so these weren't ever meant to be like a production system. They were meant to be, hey, let's demonstrate what is possible. And and for that, these have been fantastic. And and so what they did was they looked around and they said, okay, well, what what kind of components are available to us to make the kind of system that is required for this demonstration? And and these superconducting coax cables, they've been around and used for many years in cryogenic systems for a variety of of applications, not just quantum technology, but like for example, the cryogenic telescopes I was talking about, you they they they have these bolometer arrays that they're looking at very, very faint signals out in space and To really reduce the noise, And then they need to get the signals out. And these superconducting coax cables, are are great for them. Very low loss, very low noise. they're exactly what's needed for that kind of thing. And so that's why they were adopted for these quantum computers. but And and now the need is different. So they need something that's that can scale up, they need something that's more economical to make, and something that actually performs better than than than these super producting coax cadence for their needs. So that's and and that comes back to like really listening to the customers. So we've been really fortunate to to work closely with some some really good customers, really good partners. You know, we make stuff for them, they give us feedback and it's been fantastic, really
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. So how are your superconducting flex cables going to be replacing what we see here, can you explain a little bit more about that?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: essentially what at each temperature level our flex cables will take a certain number of these channels and integrate them into a single And it's it's almost like a ribbon cable. Yeah. but with micro scale features, micro scale channels, and with a certain length required for each stage. Now for example this is a cable that we're making for a partner for a cryogenic system. you get a sense of the scale of the of the cable by the by the fingers. I don't have a scale bar on the image, but but it's very, very thin, extremely thin, very tiny. this particular one has 72 channels when we talk about high density that's what we mean is we're really taking a lot of channels and and putting it into a very small area. and and What's at the heart of this really is is we're using some of our proprietary fabrication tools in some unique ways to enable us to get very fine features and very fine control of features in the superconducting material on top of the polyamid flex material. There's a lot of details that go into it, but but but that's the essence of it. There's actually multiple metal. layers multiple superconducting layers in here. You can see kind of the contact points here on this one. This little mineralization region, this is this is an important element. Being in a vacuum, you have to cool down everything and even the cabling. And so that that is actually a thermalization pad that gets into close thermal contact with the cooling elements in the in the system to allow the cable itself to be cooling down as well. these are some other designs that we've we've implemented for customers. but here in this image you can see we can we can create lines and spaces down to a few microns on the feature sizes, which is not typical for flex circuits for what you would make for your phone or something, but but is required for some of the features that we're making for our customers.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So is this based off of the photolithography technique that you mentioned or is this something else,
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So we we actually way. there's there's no semiconductor materials in in this in this cable. But what we found is that by playing with femtosecond lasers and things like that. And by playing with certain parameters we can very selectively remove the metal. leaving the polymer layers intact and we can do that to high accuracy over larger areas, which is not typically possible with lithography based approaches. now having said that we do use some lithography in the process, but we use that for larger feature sizes and certain steps that that where the lithography works. But other steps we we use our laser system, our kind of proprietary fabrication approach.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Wait, so if I understand it correctly, the the flex cable that Nielsen Scientific is developing could essentially reduce the weight of the quantum computer itself, efficiency of operation, I be able to realize the full qubit efficiency or information without any loss.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Well, there's there's multiple issues we're trying to solve at the same time. But one is, just all of the all of the mass associated with the wiring right now. there's a thermal problem with that. There's some RF issues that we're also trying to address. And the signals you don't want, eliminating those. very low RF loss. this is actually really important, not so much on the control side, but on the readout side, because the readout signal is a small signal. And so you need to be very low noise, very low RF loss. Those are all things we're we're developing. But the and and the economical fabrication that's that's actually crucial. Like if you look at roadmaps of 2029 or something from from quantum computing companies and the number of qubits, the cost for the wiring, if you don't do anything about it, is something like a billion dollars per computer. And and obviously that's not gonna work. for the biggest companies, right? And so so really what we're we're doing is is we're pushing towards that. particular cable I showed was had 72 channels in it. We're wanting to push that up and cables with a thousand channels in them. And the not too distant future, we want to continue to reduce instead of having all of all of these cables in here. we just have a little ribbon cable coming down and that's adequate for controlling, thousand qubits or something.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So with your current technology, what kind of weight reduction are we looking at? Because it's also about assembly, right? If we were to make a quantum computer in future in a in a modular, repeatable fashion, efficient, like our modern manufacturing, it better be simple than complicated. With your current technology, what's the percentage weight reduction you can anticipate?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: we haven't really looked at the weight reduction per se, but what we have looked at is like things like what is the cross section area reduction in terms of related to like how much heat is coming through. I wanna say it was like factor of a million or something like that. I mean it's it's it's a huge change. like you were pointing out in this case you're making all these little connections for every single channel and and and and that's that's like going back to the first computers that were built out of vacuum tubes, where each vacuum tube you screw in and that's one transistor essentially. Right. And and You know, if if you've messed up one vacuum cube or if it blows out, you've got to go find it. that's that's just not practical for scaling up from a weight point of view, but also from just like an assembly point of view or even a reliability point of view. I mean, you could connect all these connections up, you turn on your quantum computer and it doesn't work and you don't know why, right? I mean, it one of these connections maybe didn't tighten up quite tight enough, We're really trying to get past those practical issues as well of how to scale this up in a way that's manufacturable. It gets the weight down, gets the cost down, gets the thermal load down, and really enables the scaling up. I mean, like we don't want to just make this, 100 qubit computer better. We want to make, the 10,000 qubit system possible. And that's that's that's what we're trying to help our our customers with.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. That is that speaks to more on the disruptive innovation front rather than incremental, right? The you can spend the next five years doing the incremental innovation of making this computer better or come up with a brand new architecture or a modality.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. I mean, there's some practical issues we're we're solving, but we think we're on this path of enabling new a a quantum computer better. Our approach to the cabling enables around that. It's almost it's almost like thinking about like advanced packaging for classical computing chips, which has enabled a lot of the really high performance server chips and and data center chips. You know, we're we're kind of enabling a an integrated, almost like a packaging solution, I think, is is a way of thinking about it. Obviously, it's not apples to apples. It is a quantum computer after all, but but But that's that's one way of thinking about it. Our intention isn't really to do work on the quantum chip itself, enabling the communication to that quantum chip in in the best way possible.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. And I'm assuming right now the legacy systems are assembled manually.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Every single one is is assembled. And and there's different different different companies providing different components. You know, there's the companies providing the cryostats, the dilution refrigerators and things like that. there's some companies, sometimes the same companies providing integrated units of tested coaxial cables like this so that installing them as units and and that helps them a little bit too. But but it we need to go way beyond.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Of course. Yeah. Can you also talk a little bit or briefly about what are some of the failure points for these cables
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: that's a good question. it's usually usually it's the connections that are kind of the tricky the tricky points. allowing for connectors that are more integrated rather than just a single connector. I mean you look here if you look closely. You can see that there's connectors on both sides sides of this plate. And you have to make those connections in there. And and the thing is, is with with priogenic systems, the one of the things that happens obviously when you cool something way down to near absolute zero is certain things shrink, they Shrink at different rates. And so what's a nice, good and tight mechanical connection at room temperature may or may not be a a good connection at at 10 millikelvin. And so but also some design. But it's usually those connectors that are kind of the the the issue. And so that's that's one of the things that We are hoping to provide better solutions for where it's not just like a kind of a screw on mechanical connection, but it's something a little bit more integrated it's not it's not always like it fails or it doesn't fail. You know, that's that's not often the issue. It's like, does it meet the performance requirement? And there's some variation in that. And superconducting materials tend to have some variation in like the the temperature that it goes superconducting or or things like that, the quality of the material. And so that's something else that we're looking into and and refining as we go along is. is the quality of our superconductive materials using. That's a tricky thing.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Right. No. It it talks about thermal cycling of these materials regenerability. When I say regenerability it's coming back to their form, right? the form in which they were assembled or manufactured without going through a failure or a fatigue at one point because these are all metals and polymers that we are looking at. While quantum computing is exciting application, Greg, this technology seems to have parallel application in adjacent fields. So where else do you see opportunities in semiconductor manufacturing or advanced sensing, medical space, or even instrumentation. Can you talk a bit about it?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So we've had a number of conversations with potential partners or potential customers of other applications of this. And and there's there's probably two main groups. One is applications at cryogenic temperatures. And then another one is applications at room temperatures. the ability to make really fine featured flex circuits is advantageous even at room temperature. And like for example, one of the things we had a project funded by the army they were interested in exploring smart contact lenses, for example. And and the trick with s with smart contact lenses is you've you've got to do sensing, you've got to communicate with the outside world somehow, and you have to do that with minimal or no power. people have been working on smart contact lenses for a while, and usually what they'll do is they'll make some sort of flex circuit using traditional techniques, which is flat, and then they'll kind of bend it around and form it into a contact lens, which tends to be pretty bulky and maybe put a little battery and stuff in there, whatever. or a capacitor or something to store energy and inductively charge it, right? Well, so one one thing we did there was instead of using a flat contact lens or a flat what we did was we just put metal onto a contact lens directly and we fabricated that metal into a pattern on the curved surface, which enabled more complicated and smaller features and larger design space for the for the contact lens, smart contact lens. So that was one application that we looked at. There's other things in medical devices, very small scale ones that might be implantable or whatever, where you need a circuit to connect components together, but you want to keep that as small as possible. And because we can do extremely small features, that's another application. Now, the cryogenic space, there's a number of things that these superconducting cables could be used for that are not necessarily a quantum. and I've talked about some of those, like the belometer arrays for these telescopes, turns out for those, they want a whole bunch of pixels, and each pixel has a signal that needs to be read out. Fact word. We're we're making some cables for a customer right now that has like a thousand channels in each cable, for example. we've also had conversations with potential customers. To do like single photon, like like a C C D camera, except they measure individual single photons per pixel. So very sensitive things. that's not a quantum effect, but it is something that is done at triogen temperatures. And you need to read out each one of those pixels. And so so in that case, also you need thousands of channels that some that that we're we're looking at
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So are the materials composition wise similar to the the legacy systems or you are working with different metals in the periodic table?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So for the superconducting cables, we use we don't use copper. Copper isn't the superconductor. We use we use superconducting metals. and we've looked at a few different ones, but primarily we we use niobium for that. in the future we may look at different metals. but niobium is a good one and it fits well with the needs of quantum computers and some of these other applications. it goes superconducting around nine Kelvin and which is a good place for for these types of systems. we do use polyamid formulations that were formulated for traditional RF flex circuits and we do pick formulations that are very low loss and So we use that directly. We have had some requests using extremely pure materials for both the metal and the polymers. This is actually pretty R pure in the sense that not only are they pure in terms of not having contaminants, but they want them to be pure in terms of the isotope. So they don't want isotopes that might have might degrade and might emit a neutron. For example, we're not really building that yet, but but but that was a unique application. And the reason is is is you know, an isotope that has the potential for radioactive decay, that's a potential noise source for some these systems. And so they want you know pure but they also want
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: I'm curious. does this have any similarity to, separation of isotopes using particle accelerators and how are you sourcing your materials? because some of these are critical materials, so r there is a supply chain disruption too. Just can you talk a little bit about that?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: these isotopically pure materials, we're not really sourcing those yet, just to be clear. in terms of like like having very pure niobium, say for the superconductors, that's an important part of our we do work with some partners and there there are some US based companies that provide ultra pure niobium. there's at least two that I'm aware of, I believe. And then but a lot of the a lot of the niobium production, like I don't believe there is a mine in the US that's specifically producing niobium ore or refining that ore that I'm aware of. I I believe Brazil is produces some, Canada's Canada does some, and China of course does some as well. lower quality niobium was brought into the US and I believe there are some at least two companies doing ultra pure niobium from feedstock coming from other countries.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Speaking of the supply chain part, Greg, you mentioned few countries that you're importing. Now, any of these are strategic materials Are your customers international, national? you mentioned DOD. essentially how do you pivot to these variations in developing your technology?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: from a supply chain side, we're not consuming so much of the material now I'm not too worried yet in terms of like kind of getting adequate material. But obviously we need to have access to material. we know there's a couple of places in the US that provide them. And specifically, we want the ultra-pure niopium in the form of a specific sputter target. we deposit the material with sputtering. once we've made the material the the polyamid with the niobium and metals on it we we then process that and it's so the the supply chain isn't just the niobium source it's also it's all the steps that lead up to us getting the material we need for our processing and There are some aspects of that that we do externally with vendors here in the US, but our goal is to bring more of that in-house because we want to control the those portions, like that from a quality point of view, it's much better for us to control some of those, some of those steps.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Now this technology is developed in Salt Lake City or was was it licensed from a different company or a university or was it developed in partnership with someone?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So we've developed this technology kind of not not exactly from scratch. I mean, there's there's other people who've done high density flex cables. what we've done is we've kind of taken a different approach than what others have done. Typically, what people have done is they've used photolithography of the type that's done with Silicon wafers. And what they'll do is they'll spin on a liquid polyamide, they'll cure it, they'll deposit the niobium and whatever else on there, spin on another layer of polyamide, cure that, and they'll kind of go through that process to create the multi-layer flex cable that they that they need. and people have done some pretty amazing stuff with that. trick is it's pretty expensive to make flex cables that way. And then you're limited to the size of silicon wafer processing. So currently the very best tools can do up to 300 millimeter or 12 inch wafers, but then that's that's the size of your cable. You can't make it bigger. we're not limited by that. but we can still achieve the same features, we've had people request cables. Up to over a meter in length, although we're not we're not delivering those yet. but but our capability has the ability to scale size of wafers. we've looked at what people have done and what they've published on, and but we've we've developed our own process. we've we work really closely with Brigham Young University, they've been fantastic partners with us in the development of this. we've also worked with Slack on on this, as well as Case Western Reserve University on some aspects of it. it's a technology we've developed really here in-house, funded through the SBIR and STTR programs and and primarily but also some NRE funding from from partners and and and companies interested in in helping us develop the the capability.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. So speaking of BYU, what role do they play in the development? Is it more on the lower TRL level
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: we own tools, that we've built and developed, but in in many cases some of those tools are in laboratory space at BYU. and And that's helpful because we can we can do experiments and processes together with BYU. We can take advantage of students, we can train students actually for our needs as well, which has been great. And and then we can we can leverage the RD infrastructure at BYU for characterizing what we've made, optical microscopes, SEMs, other characterization tools, and we have partnerships with professors there that are, experts in their fields that that provide a lot of insight and value to us over the years. we work really closely with them and it's been it's been a really good partnership. as a small business, we simply We we can't afford to go out and buy them, buy these things and and we wouldn't use them, twenty-four-seven if we did anyway. So it makes sense to use shared facilities like at the university.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: almost like a timeshare if we have available on these equipment, which are sometimes super expensive, right? So speaking of, your company has really benefited from SBIR funding, these university collaborations and strategic partnerships. how important have these relationships been to your success and what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs building advanced technology companies like yours?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: These these kinds of partnerships are are invaluable. I mean they're invaluable for a a startup, a small business, but honestly, I think they're invaluable for no matter what, whether even if you're at a large company. I didn't realize this as much in when I was in graduate school. I was fortunate enough to make connections with a a variety of really sharp people in in Grassville, then going on to Sandy Labs and working there and working on multiple projects with, researchers both inside the abs and and outside and and professors, universities across the country, program directors in the federal government. when the time came, when I launched Nielsen Scientific, for example, I had I had this network of people that's that I'd worked with and I had respect for and they had respect for me. And and so when I had approached them with, hey, I, we're developing the developing a 3D fabrication capability, I want to talk with you about like where this might be useful for you, so that we can get guidance into what we should be developing. had those connections so they were willing to get on a phone call with me. I could talk through things with them. And I've talked to hundreds of people from From my network over the years related to things and and and and that is that is fantastic. it's it's it's one of the coolest things, I think, as I've gone from like some larger companies to smaller companies and things, is that people tend to want to help you succeed, right? And it's kind of a neat thing about I don't know, humanity is that people know people are generally willing to to help you out. And and I like to pay it forward as well and I try to help people out where I can. But but that network of people has been amazing. exciting and delightful aspects of of starting this company is is is having those interactions. I I kind of love it.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Sure. Right, right. It's a symbiosis that will probably
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Totally. Right. Totally. Yeah. like to feel like I'm providing a lot of value to them and likewise they're providing a lot of value to me in a lot of ways. So
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So what have been some of the biggest financial and business challenges? We talked a little bit about the technical, but other challenges that you faced and what lessons have you learned along the way?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: that's a good question. so when you are at like a national lab or even a university, wherever, I mean, like it's not the same as being in a company. And for better and worse, right? Like, at Sandia Labs, the job was very secure, right? I mean, like I the the likelihood of me being laid off was pretty slim and or even being fired was was pretty slim. but but all the same, like, if all my projects failed, there were still other projects for me to work on. And it didn't feel like risky, right? if if this proposal doesn't get funded or whatever, then know it's okay I still have work to do and get a paycheck right but the thing is is in a in a startup or in a small business that's not the case right so and in particular we we haven't taken on any outside investments up to this point But what it's done for us is it's actually helped us to focus very clearly on what do our customers want. like if we're not delivering something our customers want, we're not going to get paid. And so it's really forced us to interface really closely with our customers who happen to be like program directors in federal agencies or at companies, who need a certain thing or what or whatever. that's a good thing. That's a really good thing. The downside though is that, as we're as we're Growing and and working and developing our capabilities and our core capabilities, trying to be strategic about all that. There are times when we do not know if the next contract's gonna come in, right? from from my point of view, like that feels like real risk. yeah, we're good for the next nine months because we have this contract that gets us to that point. But if nothing comes into that point, then we're gonna have to make some big changes. there is a certain amount of stress and anxiety that's associated with that. And Two things, I guess, related to that. One is is is like paying really close attention to your customers. I think, if you're providing value, then generally speaking, not always, but the work will come. And then secondly, I've had to really face some of the anxiety that comes from these particular scenarios and say, okay. Like really think about well, what is the worst case scenario and deal with that? I can get sometimes paralyzed by by the anxiety that can come with that kind of thing, which doesn't really exist in bigger companies and things like
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So it's definitely pointing to, resource starved environment in a startup or a small business wherein you're you're s resource starved in the sense you don't have the right technicians to write funding or the partnerships and which all dictates and it only when you have outside investment may or may not understand the the the wide variety of applications, the technology that you are developing, right? So you want you want partners also that are strategic that will grow with you. it's a tough choice to find the investors that align with that. But so primarily your funding has been from the federal government and these projects that you work with the f within the federal government
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Primarily that's that's where we've gone to. outside investment is there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, it can be really useful. But the key thing is, I feel like is that you should know exactly why you're bringing that investment on. like you should know what you're gonna do with that money and why. Bringing that money in is going to lead directly to an increase in in value or increase in production, ideally. And so, for a lot of this, the deep tech stuff that we work on and we develop, for example, the flux cables, there are avenues to get funding grant programs or or RD contracts. And and there's some value in that. Like let's say I had gone to a venture capitalist and and to get money to to fund the development of these. That's great. but some of these technical experts within these these agencies and and and programs within the federal governments, they actually have a pretty good sense of what's going to be valuable and what's not for the people and the the agencies they represent. And what that means is that when we get a proposal evaluated from them, and usually they send it out to experts, there is a reasonable expectation that when you're funded for that, there is a a vetting, like a a market vetting for the technology that comes along with that. That's valuable. It's valuable to us, it's valuable to them. Now, some VCs are are very technical and understand some of that stuff with respect to deep tech, and some are not. I'm not saying that you know, VCs are great and they do technical due diligence and they go out to experts as well. But but what we found is that that that going this route has helped focus us on. On some of the key things looking to scale up production of these flex cables. we may also want and need to reach out to investors to bring in that funding to to scale up manufacturing. all of the elements that goes into a robust manufacturing line. And that takes money, right? And but but in that case, I know exactly why I'm bringing that money in. It's it's to address needs of our customers who've given us a roadmap of, you know, next year at this time, we need so many cables per week production capacity. And and that I feel really good about going to a an investor and saying this is why we need
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: it's almost like a playbook that you're describing for innovators to to de-risk the technology far enough to seek the next level of funding for scaling, right? Which is when the governments will not step in at a higher TRL level. So I think that is pretty strategic and you know, smart off innovators like you. Like today, what do you need for you to scale up your cables? Is it a resource limitation, technician limitation, workforce other workforce limitation, capability, infrastructure?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, I mean it's it's a little bit of all of the above. to make more cables, we're gonna need more tools. And some of these tools are proprietary tools that we've built in house. it's not just we go out and buy a tool from whoever and put it in a line and away we go. We've got all the automation software, all of the components, putting it together, doing calibration, all that stuff. it takes work and it takes time. And you know, we need we need technicians, we need manufacturing technicians who understand what to do. And You know, again, we're doing things in a very unique way. It's not like we can go out and hire somebody who knows exactly what we're doing. And so we're we're developing, you know, training we're developing our our quality system saying this is the standard way of making this, doing this particular step of the process, and we do it that way every single time until we've identified an improvement. And then we swap that out. But but We need to do each of those steps exactly the same way. These are sensitive things that we're making. And if we don't maintain that, then our, you know, our quality suffers, our deal suffers. we need quality system engineers, we need manufacturing engineers, we need all of these, all these people. we need administrative people. experience with some of the technical the challenges of of of scaling up what is a really a deep tech technology it'd be great to find people like that marketing people that have a technical bent how do you find people who can communicate well something as complex as quantum computing to people who maybe aren't very familiar with quantum mechanics
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: And are you the only founder or do you have co founders first Nielsen Scientific?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: so I'm I'm I'm the only founder. We I have a great team and we've had some people who've worked with the company for a long time. but but I'm a I'm a sole founder.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: And how many employees do you have currently?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Let's see, we have we have nine right now. And we have some postings out. I think over the next little bit, we'll be hiring a few more technicians, at least two or three more engineers. And frankly, I need help on some administrative things as well.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: so who would be an ideal technician? how fast can they be trained? Do they have to be somebody who is hands-on would be just enough for this job?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: it would be nice if they had some experience in a clean room environment. Now a lot of what we do is is different than like what you might do in a traditional clean room for like semiconductor silicon processing. But some of the ways to keep them clean and uncontaminated, Just that that understanding is important. There are some hazardous chemicals and things that we work with, you know, so so people who've maybe been exposed to that, had some training that that that's definitely a plus. Although of course we do training around that as well. Important. You know, we have lasers, we operate them in safe ways, but still having some laser safety or laser experience could be useful. Again, not necessary, but being able to be very detail oriented. there's certain alignment steps between the layers that are really critical. And so being detail oriented and figuring out, okay, is that aligned or not? That's that's a key thing, but also just detail oriented to do the exact same thing every single time without skipping a step. which we've identified. And so like like that kind of attention and detail, that's that's really important. probably like my my hands tend to shake. I sometimes joke that I wouldn't be the best technician for our company, but but things like that, being able to handle handle things that have fine features and and sometimes requires like hand assembly at this stage. You know, some of these things will be automating in the future, but but but but being able to handle that kind of thing is important at this stage.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So do you yourself show up in the lab putting things together or you're just the brains behind the standard operating procedures?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: I used to show up in the lab. I mean I mean for a couple of years, Nielsen Scientific had a head count of one. we had partners with universities and we had students actually one of the things that's been great with students is you can kind of expand or contract your workforce is necessary to a certain degree. That's very helpful.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Particularly for a small business who don't have to have too many people on the payroll, right?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, yeah. So so managing that, staying lean. I do go into the lab, but mostly I just because I enjoy the the team, you know, enjoy celebrating with them the successes that we have and we have engineers now who are really sharp and they're kind of in in the day to day details of of of you know addressing things, figuring things out, and and passing those on to technicians.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: how do you retain the talent? Like what are your potential risks? Going where the money is, following the money. Maybe somebody from from a different state or different nation would offer you a lapse space to scale this up. How do those those things happen for this technology? Are you there yet or not?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: I mean those things do happen. talking to some of our partners, we do see people getting poached from you know one you know from one team to another, or you know, one quantum team to another. you know, you see acquisitions, you know, a number of quantum computing companies have been pretty active in in the acquisition space. Part of that is I think to to bring in expertise, you know, as a way to to to get high performers that way. here's my philosophy as as a as a around retaining people. You know, I I definitely want to make sure that they are participating in the upside of the company. So you know everybody participates in in in the equity it's a different structure of how we're we're approaching it everybody participates in in the upside of the company. the other thing I think that is way more important is the company culture. I'm sure many people have had the experience where you've been in a company where the culture is There's a lot politics, there's a lot of backbiting or whatever. that's a miserable place to work. Finally. we have some core core values that are really actually meaningful. And those are include things like like service and solutions and respect, You know, they mean something to us, to the whole team. And so what that does is it sets the stage for this is the culture for for Nielsen Scientific. This is who we are, this is how we operate, and it's how we interact with each other. And it's created a beautiful culture and a wonderful team. they may get poached, they may go off and do something else, but for the most part, the team is really happy. In fact, I I think I think everybody loves being part of the team. And honestly, that's, that's, that's a really satisfying part my job is creating together with the team that kind of a environment and culture. None of it
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great, great. any any developments that excite you for the next few years for Nielsen Scientific and generally this technology at large?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: this is a really exciting time for quantum computing, you know. So like we talked about how quantum computing in the past up until a year or so ago, maybe, it was about these hero demonstrations, you know, it was like a science project, you know, and and throwing everything you had at making a quantum computer that that could do quantum calculations with a hundred qubits or whatever. and and showing quantum advantage and and it's been an exciting time because people have have started to show that if you talk to people there is this transition from the idea that quantum computers are this unique science project you know to This is how quantum or how computing will go in the future. And that is exciting. And being a part of that is is just really, really exciting. we love to solve problems for people. And this is this is right down the road. And so we're we're really excited about these developments. we're excited to to be moving forward with this. And you know, I think one of the things that people don't understand about quantum computing so well is that it's not like classical computing where to double computing power you need an additional you know exact copy of a data center. To double a computing power of a quantum computer, you need one more qubit. And and that makes all the difference. it's been a pleasure talking with you, Dolly.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Absolutely. And any final advice for the students or engineers and also the investor community that might be watching? Do you have a message?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: quantum, just like any other industry, has the needs of of every every industry, you know. Yeah, it needs the physicists who understand quantum mechanics, you know, to a very fine detail. But that's actually just a sliver of what the industry needs, you know. Like I said, we need manufacturing engineers, we need technicians, we need marketing people, we need, you know. Bookkeepers, right? We need the accountants. we need a way to figure out the finance side of all of this, you know. all of that, all, all aspects of of business are required. And there's many different ways of approaching that and solving those problems. And and I think being this is an opportunity to be to be creative, to really look at where the pain points are and the problems that need to be solved and think about, hey, am I the one to solve that? I think, I think, you know, like any newly launching industry that's that's a great time to to to create a new business and address problems
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Anything for the network at large
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: we very much like to partner with people let us know. we're we're very open. we are looking to expand and grow and and we'd love to make connections and and start talking with people about about that possibility as well. So
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Greg, thank you so much for joining me today on Quantum Ecosystem Conversation. It's been a pleasure learning about your remarkable journey from MIT to Sandia National Labs and founding Nielsen Scientific, helping you solve some of the technical challenges that will enable the next generation of quantum computing. Your story definitely reminds that innovation happens at every level of ecosystem and that transformative technologies are built not only by the companies that make headlines, but also by engineers, entrepreneurs, risk takers, and disruptors like yourself. thank you for sharing your expertise, your vision and passion and it's been truly an honor to have you today.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, thank you, Dolan.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Thank you. Great.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, thanks, Darley. It's nice to visit with you today.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. Greg, let's begin with your journey. Can you give us a background about yourself, your education in detail?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: as you mentioned, my background is in, micro and nano systems and nanotechnology. done a lot of work in optics and a lot of combining optics with microfabrication, optical mems, that kind of thing, optical electronics. started working in this area in in graduate school back back in Boston at MIT my thesis was MEMS devices with silicon photonics, so waveguides on a chip. This was back during fiber optic bubble background, 2000. And and so there's a lot of interest in that. And so we were doing some interesting things and building some really cool stuff and and was lucky to be part of a part of a really Great research group, great advisor, and really worked with quite a few professors. And it was it was a neat experience. from there I went to Sandia Labs. I was a Truman Fellow, which is this is a great opportunity to to they give you three years of funding to pursue kind of whatever you want. And that was that was pretty unique. so I was doing some work for very advanced. High-speed MEMS switching, primarily for And actually, this was the very first time that I proposed something that was quantum related. But back then, in those early days at Sandia, we wound up working with some colleagues at Sandia and David Weineland on a proposal for doing MEMS switching for iron-trapped qubits. it wasn't funded, unfortunately, real foray into quantum related technology. But but I worked at Sandy Labs for 11 years, inertial sensing, navigation For GPS denied areas, for example, also worked in silicon photonics for various applications. did a lot of work in optoelectronics, applying microsystem ideas to solar cells. and there were some unique advantages there. built a big program in that, worked with a lot of people in Sandia, outside of Sandia National Labs Universities, and ultimately wound up deciding to take entrepreneurial leave from Sandia to start a company to commercialize those solar technologies. One of my passions, I suppose you can say, is is solving really difficult problems, these deep tech problems. And and solving it mean to me, means more than just writing a paper, more than just submitting patents to the patent office or whatever. It's actually bringing that solution to people who can use it and need it in in in a way they can like implement it into their systems. things were going really well for me at Sandita, but but really for me personally I felt like I needed to take that next step. And so we launched this company Empower Technology and and it's doing pretty well actually although I left shortly after founding the company for personal reasons ultimately became the chief scientist at Viven Solar. which was great. There's a lot of great experiences, opportunities there, but ultimately wanted to get back into some of the deeper tech problems and and solutions was drawn to that. 2017-2018 time frame launched Nielsen Scientific so we've done that and developed some additional kind of related proprietary fabrication techniques, and we've been applying those techniques to various challenging technologies and and problems technical problems that that are needed and one of one of which of course is our high density super flux cables which address a critical need in quantum computing and we're really excited about that one actually we're we're doing some really really great work
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So when you founded Nielsen Scientific, what was your primary vision for the company? Did you start off working on the superconducting flex cables back then?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: no. So the the primary goal was really around that three-dimensional microfabrication capability. Having worked in in microsystems for a long time, and and designed a lot of systems and gone through the fabrication of them, microfabrication relies on photolithography and and that's grown up around integrated circuits, silicon integrated circuits and they're I mean fantastic, amazing, amazing technology. But what that what photolithography is is really a two-dimensional image on a flat surface. And and so when you design things with that with photolithography as the basis of your your fabrication technique, it means that that you're basically making a two-dimensional structure that you extrude extrude into the third dimension. So it's it's a limited three-dimensional structure, really like extruded 2Ds is what people kind of refer to it as. And and that's fine. I mean, you can do some really amazing stuff with that, but but it occurred to me, I mean, a long time ago, when I was designing a really complicated VEMS device, that man, if you could do something three-dimensional, full full freedom to to fabricate something three-dimensional. you could do some amazing stuff in the micro realm. And and that was what what was the goal is to develop that technology. when we first started, it was just a a concept, we can make structures that nobody else in the world can make because of our our capabilities.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: It's amazing. is there a competitor for you right now? adjacent technology?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: an adjacent technology to that would probably be a what's called two-photon polymerization. And this is a technology that I think the first company that really had a tool is a company called Nanoscribe that came out of Europe. And they've done some great stuff. but what they are doing is they're making three-dimensional microstructures, nanostructures even, submicron in polymers and these are like photo definable polymers they can make some pretty cool stuff and it's impressive. however everything they do it depends on the photo definable nature of the polymers they're working in. So they can only make these three-dimensional microstructures in polymeric materials. that has its place and it's very useful in some respects but You know, but sometimes you want materials that have better mechanical properties than polymers or or different electrical properties or optical properties or whatever. And so what we've developed is a capability to make those kinds of microstructures, three three-dimensional microstructures in high quality single crystal semiconductor materials like silicon or silicon carbide or diamond or gallium arsenide, gallium nitride, whatever you want. It is a technique that relies on the semiconductor properties of the material. And so it is semiconductor based, but but those materials are amazing.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So for those who are unfamiliar with Nielsen Scientific, what problems or the problem statements are you solving today and what makes your techniques unique?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So our techniques allow us to make things that that are hard to make otherwise. And while we have this capability for three-dimensional structures, it's semiconductors, what we found is that the same tool has the ability to do some interesting fabrication techniques that that are a little unusual And things came up with our superconducting flux case. So I ran into a a researcher from Brookhaven National Lab presenting some stuff related to our three dimensional fabrication, and she asked us if we could do something to make these metamaterial filters for terahertz optics and and it looked like something we could do. So we looked into it and sure enough that was something that our our capabilities could could do. we try to solve problems for people, and so when we talk to people, they have these technical problems that that that they don't have a solution for. Don't know the technology, they don't have the technology, or they don't have a way to make the structure that they need to solve their problem. And so we we try to be very customer focused in that respect, really pay attention to what our customers say and what they need, and then try to solve those problems for them. this led us to this researcher in Brookhaven. She introduced us to some people at Case Western. great partnership there. And they they referred us to some people at Slack who needed a high-density superconducting flex cable for a telescope system they were developing. that was about five years ago, and we developed these high-density superconducting flex cables. Well, as it turns out, that that solution for these telescopes that that had these bolometer arrays in cryogenic systems actually addresses a really important need in quantum computing. And and so we've been working with now partners to address this challenge that they have. And so I I think this is actually an important lesson is that that in business of any sort, whether it's deep tech or whatever, listening really carefully to your to your customers. They have needs. You know, there's things, there's pain points, there's things that are keeping them up at night. how in the world am I going to connect interconnect all of these qubits that we have planned in our roadmap, for example, and and and then, if you listen carefully to your customers, you can solve their pain points. they love it. And and that's that's what we love doing. So
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Right. it's it's an excellent point. Basically, you're not pushing your solution onto the customers. You are scouting for problem statements from them, and then essentially coming coming up with a developing a solution and later s looking at what are the other adjacent fields that could be applied for, right? Most often in research fields. you come up with a solution and try to force fit it into different unoptimized or a mismatched problem statement. And I think great great point that you just talked about, Greg. So for for viewers who might be very new to quantum hardware, what are superconducting flex cables? Why are they important and what role do they play inside a superconducting quantum computer?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, well that's a great question. So let me this probably is a good time to show a few images. So so this shows a picture here. This is a an image from Google from their this is one of their quantum computers that they built over the last few years. And I mean, it's a very sciencey looking picture bit of work. let me kind of describe what you're seeing here. So right down here, at the bottom, this is the coldest part of the quantum computer. And this part, this whole system, it goes down into a vacuum chamber and then it's cooled to very low temperatures. And each layer here is a different temperature stage. And right down here, it's kind of buried in all these wires and stuff is is the quantum chip. And this is where the superconducting qubits exist. multiple qubits there. And and that's that's where the computation occurs. But if you look up here, obviously there's a lot more structure going on. And what you see is all of these wires. And these wires, especially down here in the lower temperature regions from about, probably this stage on down, are all superconducting coax cables. And there are thousands of them. I mean, you thousands of these cables and and these are not, these aren't your run-of-the-mill cables that you use to connect up your TV to your caber. they are coax cable in that sense, but they are actually superconductive. So these cables are pretty expensive. manufactured anywhere from like $2,000 up to $7,000 each. And so when you get thousands of these, this winds up being a very costly system to make. so you have to bring those signals down to the qubit and then back out of the refrigerator to a classical computing chip to interpret what's going on in the in the qubits and to control them. So the bulk of this really is these kinds of wires. Quantum computer is really impressive. You can do some really amazing things. But the problem is these individual single-channel coax cables are not scalable to the numbers of qubits that people need to get to to have a fully functional, high power quantum computer. They need a different solution. And that solution doesn't fully exist yet, and but But that's what we're addressing is this wiring problem of getting the signals from kind of the room temperature, classical computing systems down to the qubits and then back out again. And as that scales up, all of that needs to be integrated. And that's what we're working. That's the problem solving.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: you said single qubit would be needing three to five of these cables, is that correct?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, and it's three to five cables for each stage, each temperature stage. So it it really kind of expands out from there.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So based on the current architecture, what is the maximum amount of qubits that a quantum computer is able to offer.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, that's a good question. It actually comes down to the cooling power of the system. And and what what is what is at issue here is is each of these wires, it actually brings in a certain amount of heat from the outside world down to the quantum chip. Now the quantum chip needs to be 10 to 20 millikelvin, so very, very, very cold. But at that low of a temperature, there's a limited Amount heat that you can pull out, that you can reject out of the system. And so what happens is because these each of these cables has sort of a certain cross-section area, each cable brings down a certain amount of heat, and all of that heat needs to be pulled out. Now exactly the number of of qubits that can be accommodated is a little bit dependent on the on the refrigeration system and how big and complicated that is. But but it's clear that That the cross-section area of these of these coax cables is just too large to scale up beyond much beyond where where people are at. It also depends a little bit on the quantum error correction that people are doing. So, like one logical qubit is actually a combination of multiple qubits. And it depends on how many physical qubits you need to represent a a logical qubit. So it's kind of a complicated question, but Like the fundamental issue is how much heat is coming into the system and how much is you're rejecting. And then, some aspects of the qubits themselves. the cross section area of each of each wire holds down a certain amount of heat. And so to solve this problem, it's not just a matter of integrating all these cables into a single cable. It's also reducing the cross-section area and using techniques that reduce the amount of heat transfer going down the cable.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: if the performance of the qubit remains untouched or unaltered during this process, then you could have zero error that can translate to, for example, thousand qubits. Let's just take thousand physical qubits is equal to one logical qubit. It's just an equivalency I'm doing. But then it would be linear that way, right? Without if there was no error in the system. Am I reading that right?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, I mean that's that's one tech technique of of fault tolerance for quantum computing is is is aggregating a number of qubits to represent one. that is especially superconducting qubits where it's relatively easy to make multiple qubits, that's that's the route they're going. it's usually not a thousand to one, but it's but it's many, it's tens at least, maybe a hundred to one, depending on the
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: these cables were developed in a different field or for a different application when they were putting this quantum computer together almost a decade ago. what can you talk a bit about that technology that was adopted to to build the quantum computers? this one, the the legacy one.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, yeah. So, like these this quantum computer here and and essentially all of the quantum computers have been almost like science projects, like hero projects, like like we want to demonstrate that this has a path forward, that it that it works, that we can bring together, a certain number of qubits and we can do a quantum calculation. And so these weren't ever meant to be like a production system. They were meant to be, hey, let's demonstrate what is possible. And and for that, these have been fantastic. And and so what they did was they looked around and they said, okay, well, what what kind of components are available to us to make the kind of system that is required for this demonstration? And and these superconducting coax cables, they've been around and used for many years in cryogenic systems for a variety of of applications, not just quantum technology, but like for example, the cryogenic telescopes I was talking about, you they they they have these bolometer arrays that they're looking at very, very faint signals out in space and To really reduce the noise, And then they need to get the signals out. And these superconducting coax cables, are are great for them. Very low loss, very low noise. they're exactly what's needed for that kind of thing. And so that's why they were adopted for these quantum computers. but And and now the need is different. So they need something that's that can scale up, they need something that's more economical to make, and something that actually performs better than than than these super producting coax cadence for their needs. So that's and and that comes back to like really listening to the customers. So we've been really fortunate to to work closely with some some really good customers, really good partners. You know, we make stuff for them, they give us feedback and it's been fantastic, really
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. So how are your superconducting flex cables going to be replacing what we see here, can you explain a little bit more about that?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: essentially what at each temperature level our flex cables will take a certain number of these channels and integrate them into a single And it's it's almost like a ribbon cable. Yeah. but with micro scale features, micro scale channels, and with a certain length required for each stage. Now for example this is a cable that we're making for a partner for a cryogenic system. you get a sense of the scale of the of the cable by the by the fingers. I don't have a scale bar on the image, but but it's very, very thin, extremely thin, very tiny. this particular one has 72 channels when we talk about high density that's what we mean is we're really taking a lot of channels and and putting it into a very small area. and and What's at the heart of this really is is we're using some of our proprietary fabrication tools in some unique ways to enable us to get very fine features and very fine control of features in the superconducting material on top of the polyamid flex material. There's a lot of details that go into it, but but but that's the essence of it. There's actually multiple metal. layers multiple superconducting layers in here. You can see kind of the contact points here on this one. This little mineralization region, this is this is an important element. Being in a vacuum, you have to cool down everything and even the cabling. And so that that is actually a thermalization pad that gets into close thermal contact with the cooling elements in the in the system to allow the cable itself to be cooling down as well. these are some other designs that we've we've implemented for customers. but here in this image you can see we can we can create lines and spaces down to a few microns on the feature sizes, which is not typical for flex circuits for what you would make for your phone or something, but but is required for some of the features that we're making for our customers.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So is this based off of the photolithography technique that you mentioned or is this something else,
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So we we actually way. there's there's no semiconductor materials in in this in this cable. But what we found is that by playing with femtosecond lasers and things like that. And by playing with certain parameters we can very selectively remove the metal. leaving the polymer layers intact and we can do that to high accuracy over larger areas, which is not typically possible with lithography based approaches. now having said that we do use some lithography in the process, but we use that for larger feature sizes and certain steps that that where the lithography works. But other steps we we use our laser system, our kind of proprietary fabrication approach.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Wait, so if I understand it correctly, the the flex cable that Nielsen Scientific is developing could essentially reduce the weight of the quantum computer itself, efficiency of operation, I be able to realize the full qubit efficiency or information without any loss.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Well, there's there's multiple issues we're trying to solve at the same time. But one is, just all of the all of the mass associated with the wiring right now. there's a thermal problem with that. There's some RF issues that we're also trying to address. And the signals you don't want, eliminating those. very low RF loss. this is actually really important, not so much on the control side, but on the readout side, because the readout signal is a small signal. And so you need to be very low noise, very low RF loss. Those are all things we're we're developing. But the and and the economical fabrication that's that's actually crucial. Like if you look at roadmaps of 2029 or something from from quantum computing companies and the number of qubits, the cost for the wiring, if you don't do anything about it, is something like a billion dollars per computer. And and obviously that's not gonna work. for the biggest companies, right? And so so really what we're we're doing is is we're pushing towards that. particular cable I showed was had 72 channels in it. We're wanting to push that up and cables with a thousand channels in them. And the not too distant future, we want to continue to reduce instead of having all of all of these cables in here. we just have a little ribbon cable coming down and that's adequate for controlling, thousand qubits or something.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So with your current technology, what kind of weight reduction are we looking at? Because it's also about assembly, right? If we were to make a quantum computer in future in a in a modular, repeatable fashion, efficient, like our modern manufacturing, it better be simple than complicated. With your current technology, what's the percentage weight reduction you can anticipate?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: we haven't really looked at the weight reduction per se, but what we have looked at is like things like what is the cross section area reduction in terms of related to like how much heat is coming through. I wanna say it was like factor of a million or something like that. I mean it's it's it's a huge change. like you were pointing out in this case you're making all these little connections for every single channel and and and and that's that's like going back to the first computers that were built out of vacuum tubes, where each vacuum tube you screw in and that's one transistor essentially. Right. And and You know, if if you've messed up one vacuum cube or if it blows out, you've got to go find it. that's that's just not practical for scaling up from a weight point of view, but also from just like an assembly point of view or even a reliability point of view. I mean, you could connect all these connections up, you turn on your quantum computer and it doesn't work and you don't know why, right? I mean, it one of these connections maybe didn't tighten up quite tight enough, We're really trying to get past those practical issues as well of how to scale this up in a way that's manufacturable. It gets the weight down, gets the cost down, gets the thermal load down, and really enables the scaling up. I mean, like we don't want to just make this, 100 qubit computer better. We want to make, the 10,000 qubit system possible. And that's that's that's what we're trying to help our our customers with.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. That is that speaks to more on the disruptive innovation front rather than incremental, right? The you can spend the next five years doing the incremental innovation of making this computer better or come up with a brand new architecture or a modality.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. I mean, there's some practical issues we're we're solving, but we think we're on this path of enabling new a a quantum computer better. Our approach to the cabling enables around that. It's almost it's almost like thinking about like advanced packaging for classical computing chips, which has enabled a lot of the really high performance server chips and and data center chips. You know, we're we're kind of enabling a an integrated, almost like a packaging solution, I think, is is a way of thinking about it. Obviously, it's not apples to apples. It is a quantum computer after all, but but But that's that's one way of thinking about it. Our intention isn't really to do work on the quantum chip itself, enabling the communication to that quantum chip in in the best way possible.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. And I'm assuming right now the legacy systems are assembled manually.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Every single one is is assembled. And and there's different different different companies providing different components. You know, there's the companies providing the cryostats, the dilution refrigerators and things like that. there's some companies, sometimes the same companies providing integrated units of tested coaxial cables like this so that installing them as units and and that helps them a little bit too. But but it we need to go way beyond.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Of course. Yeah. Can you also talk a little bit or briefly about what are some of the failure points for these cables
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: that's a good question. it's usually usually it's the connections that are kind of the tricky the tricky points. allowing for connectors that are more integrated rather than just a single connector. I mean you look here if you look closely. You can see that there's connectors on both sides sides of this plate. And you have to make those connections in there. And and the thing is, is with with priogenic systems, the one of the things that happens obviously when you cool something way down to near absolute zero is certain things shrink, they Shrink at different rates. And so what's a nice, good and tight mechanical connection at room temperature may or may not be a a good connection at at 10 millikelvin. And so but also some design. But it's usually those connectors that are kind of the the the issue. And so that's that's one of the things that We are hoping to provide better solutions for where it's not just like a kind of a screw on mechanical connection, but it's something a little bit more integrated it's not it's not always like it fails or it doesn't fail. You know, that's that's not often the issue. It's like, does it meet the performance requirement? And there's some variation in that. And superconducting materials tend to have some variation in like the the temperature that it goes superconducting or or things like that, the quality of the material. And so that's something else that we're looking into and and refining as we go along is. is the quality of our superconductive materials using. That's a tricky thing.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Right. No. It it talks about thermal cycling of these materials regenerability. When I say regenerability it's coming back to their form, right? the form in which they were assembled or manufactured without going through a failure or a fatigue at one point because these are all metals and polymers that we are looking at. While quantum computing is exciting application, Greg, this technology seems to have parallel application in adjacent fields. So where else do you see opportunities in semiconductor manufacturing or advanced sensing, medical space, or even instrumentation. Can you talk a bit about it?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So we've had a number of conversations with potential partners or potential customers of other applications of this. And and there's there's probably two main groups. One is applications at cryogenic temperatures. And then another one is applications at room temperatures. the ability to make really fine featured flex circuits is advantageous even at room temperature. And like for example, one of the things we had a project funded by the army they were interested in exploring smart contact lenses, for example. And and the trick with s with smart contact lenses is you've you've got to do sensing, you've got to communicate with the outside world somehow, and you have to do that with minimal or no power. people have been working on smart contact lenses for a while, and usually what they'll do is they'll make some sort of flex circuit using traditional techniques, which is flat, and then they'll kind of bend it around and form it into a contact lens, which tends to be pretty bulky and maybe put a little battery and stuff in there, whatever. or a capacitor or something to store energy and inductively charge it, right? Well, so one one thing we did there was instead of using a flat contact lens or a flat what we did was we just put metal onto a contact lens directly and we fabricated that metal into a pattern on the curved surface, which enabled more complicated and smaller features and larger design space for the for the contact lens, smart contact lens. So that was one application that we looked at. There's other things in medical devices, very small scale ones that might be implantable or whatever, where you need a circuit to connect components together, but you want to keep that as small as possible. And because we can do extremely small features, that's another application. Now, the cryogenic space, there's a number of things that these superconducting cables could be used for that are not necessarily a quantum. and I've talked about some of those, like the belometer arrays for these telescopes, turns out for those, they want a whole bunch of pixels, and each pixel has a signal that needs to be read out. Fact word. We're we're making some cables for a customer right now that has like a thousand channels in each cable, for example. we've also had conversations with potential customers. To do like single photon, like like a C C D camera, except they measure individual single photons per pixel. So very sensitive things. that's not a quantum effect, but it is something that is done at triogen temperatures. And you need to read out each one of those pixels. And so so in that case, also you need thousands of channels that some that that we're we're looking at
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So are the materials composition wise similar to the the legacy systems or you are working with different metals in the periodic table?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So for the superconducting cables, we use we don't use copper. Copper isn't the superconductor. We use we use superconducting metals. and we've looked at a few different ones, but primarily we we use niobium for that. in the future we may look at different metals. but niobium is a good one and it fits well with the needs of quantum computers and some of these other applications. it goes superconducting around nine Kelvin and which is a good place for for these types of systems. we do use polyamid formulations that were formulated for traditional RF flex circuits and we do pick formulations that are very low loss and So we use that directly. We have had some requests using extremely pure materials for both the metal and the polymers. This is actually pretty R pure in the sense that not only are they pure in terms of not having contaminants, but they want them to be pure in terms of the isotope. So they don't want isotopes that might have might degrade and might emit a neutron. For example, we're not really building that yet, but but but that was a unique application. And the reason is is is you know, an isotope that has the potential for radioactive decay, that's a potential noise source for some these systems. And so they want you know pure but they also want
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: I'm curious. does this have any similarity to, separation of isotopes using particle accelerators and how are you sourcing your materials? because some of these are critical materials, so r there is a supply chain disruption too. Just can you talk a little bit about that?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: these isotopically pure materials, we're not really sourcing those yet, just to be clear. in terms of like like having very pure niobium, say for the superconductors, that's an important part of our we do work with some partners and there there are some US based companies that provide ultra pure niobium. there's at least two that I'm aware of, I believe. And then but a lot of the a lot of the niobium production, like I don't believe there is a mine in the US that's specifically producing niobium ore or refining that ore that I'm aware of. I I believe Brazil is produces some, Canada's Canada does some, and China of course does some as well. lower quality niobium was brought into the US and I believe there are some at least two companies doing ultra pure niobium from feedstock coming from other countries.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Speaking of the supply chain part, Greg, you mentioned few countries that you're importing. Now, any of these are strategic materials Are your customers international, national? you mentioned DOD. essentially how do you pivot to these variations in developing your technology?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: from a supply chain side, we're not consuming so much of the material now I'm not too worried yet in terms of like kind of getting adequate material. But obviously we need to have access to material. we know there's a couple of places in the US that provide them. And specifically, we want the ultra-pure niopium in the form of a specific sputter target. we deposit the material with sputtering. once we've made the material the the polyamid with the niobium and metals on it we we then process that and it's so the the supply chain isn't just the niobium source it's also it's all the steps that lead up to us getting the material we need for our processing and There are some aspects of that that we do externally with vendors here in the US, but our goal is to bring more of that in-house because we want to control the those portions, like that from a quality point of view, it's much better for us to control some of those, some of those steps.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Now this technology is developed in Salt Lake City or was was it licensed from a different company or a university or was it developed in partnership with someone?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: So we've developed this technology kind of not not exactly from scratch. I mean, there's there's other people who've done high density flex cables. what we've done is we've kind of taken a different approach than what others have done. Typically, what people have done is they've used photolithography of the type that's done with Silicon wafers. And what they'll do is they'll spin on a liquid polyamide, they'll cure it, they'll deposit the niobium and whatever else on there, spin on another layer of polyamide, cure that, and they'll kind of go through that process to create the multi-layer flex cable that they that they need. and people have done some pretty amazing stuff with that. trick is it's pretty expensive to make flex cables that way. And then you're limited to the size of silicon wafer processing. So currently the very best tools can do up to 300 millimeter or 12 inch wafers, but then that's that's the size of your cable. You can't make it bigger. we're not limited by that. but we can still achieve the same features, we've had people request cables. Up to over a meter in length, although we're not we're not delivering those yet. but but our capability has the ability to scale size of wafers. we've looked at what people have done and what they've published on, and but we've we've developed our own process. we've we work really closely with Brigham Young University, they've been fantastic partners with us in the development of this. we've also worked with Slack on on this, as well as Case Western Reserve University on some aspects of it. it's a technology we've developed really here in-house, funded through the SBIR and STTR programs and and primarily but also some NRE funding from from partners and and and companies interested in in helping us develop the the capability.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great. So speaking of BYU, what role do they play in the development? Is it more on the lower TRL level
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: we own tools, that we've built and developed, but in in many cases some of those tools are in laboratory space at BYU. and And that's helpful because we can we can do experiments and processes together with BYU. We can take advantage of students, we can train students actually for our needs as well, which has been great. And and then we can we can leverage the RD infrastructure at BYU for characterizing what we've made, optical microscopes, SEMs, other characterization tools, and we have partnerships with professors there that are, experts in their fields that that provide a lot of insight and value to us over the years. we work really closely with them and it's been it's been a really good partnership. as a small business, we simply We we can't afford to go out and buy them, buy these things and and we wouldn't use them, twenty-four-seven if we did anyway. So it makes sense to use shared facilities like at the university.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: almost like a timeshare if we have available on these equipment, which are sometimes super expensive, right? So speaking of, your company has really benefited from SBIR funding, these university collaborations and strategic partnerships. how important have these relationships been to your success and what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs building advanced technology companies like yours?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: These these kinds of partnerships are are invaluable. I mean they're invaluable for a a startup, a small business, but honestly, I think they're invaluable for no matter what, whether even if you're at a large company. I didn't realize this as much in when I was in graduate school. I was fortunate enough to make connections with a a variety of really sharp people in in Grassville, then going on to Sandy Labs and working there and working on multiple projects with, researchers both inside the abs and and outside and and professors, universities across the country, program directors in the federal government. when the time came, when I launched Nielsen Scientific, for example, I had I had this network of people that's that I'd worked with and I had respect for and they had respect for me. And and so when I had approached them with, hey, I, we're developing the developing a 3D fabrication capability, I want to talk with you about like where this might be useful for you, so that we can get guidance into what we should be developing. had those connections so they were willing to get on a phone call with me. I could talk through things with them. And I've talked to hundreds of people from From my network over the years related to things and and and and that is that is fantastic. it's it's it's one of the coolest things, I think, as I've gone from like some larger companies to smaller companies and things, is that people tend to want to help you succeed, right? And it's kind of a neat thing about I don't know, humanity is that people know people are generally willing to to help you out. And and I like to pay it forward as well and I try to help people out where I can. But but that network of people has been amazing. exciting and delightful aspects of of starting this company is is is having those interactions. I I kind of love it.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Sure. Right, right. It's a symbiosis that will probably
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Totally. Right. Totally. Yeah. like to feel like I'm providing a lot of value to them and likewise they're providing a lot of value to me in a lot of ways. So
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So what have been some of the biggest financial and business challenges? We talked a little bit about the technical, but other challenges that you faced and what lessons have you learned along the way?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: that's a good question. so when you are at like a national lab or even a university, wherever, I mean, like it's not the same as being in a company. And for better and worse, right? Like, at Sandia Labs, the job was very secure, right? I mean, like I the the likelihood of me being laid off was pretty slim and or even being fired was was pretty slim. but but all the same, like, if all my projects failed, there were still other projects for me to work on. And it didn't feel like risky, right? if if this proposal doesn't get funded or whatever, then know it's okay I still have work to do and get a paycheck right but the thing is is in a in a startup or in a small business that's not the case right so and in particular we we haven't taken on any outside investments up to this point But what it's done for us is it's actually helped us to focus very clearly on what do our customers want. like if we're not delivering something our customers want, we're not going to get paid. And so it's really forced us to interface really closely with our customers who happen to be like program directors in federal agencies or at companies, who need a certain thing or what or whatever. that's a good thing. That's a really good thing. The downside though is that, as we're as we're Growing and and working and developing our capabilities and our core capabilities, trying to be strategic about all that. There are times when we do not know if the next contract's gonna come in, right? from from my point of view, like that feels like real risk. yeah, we're good for the next nine months because we have this contract that gets us to that point. But if nothing comes into that point, then we're gonna have to make some big changes. there is a certain amount of stress and anxiety that's associated with that. And Two things, I guess, related to that. One is is is like paying really close attention to your customers. I think, if you're providing value, then generally speaking, not always, but the work will come. And then secondly, I've had to really face some of the anxiety that comes from these particular scenarios and say, okay. Like really think about well, what is the worst case scenario and deal with that? I can get sometimes paralyzed by by the anxiety that can come with that kind of thing, which doesn't really exist in bigger companies and things like
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So it's definitely pointing to, resource starved environment in a startup or a small business wherein you're you're s resource starved in the sense you don't have the right technicians to write funding or the partnerships and which all dictates and it only when you have outside investment may or may not understand the the the wide variety of applications, the technology that you are developing, right? So you want you want partners also that are strategic that will grow with you. it's a tough choice to find the investors that align with that. But so primarily your funding has been from the federal government and these projects that you work with the f within the federal government
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Primarily that's that's where we've gone to. outside investment is there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, it can be really useful. But the key thing is, I feel like is that you should know exactly why you're bringing that investment on. like you should know what you're gonna do with that money and why. Bringing that money in is going to lead directly to an increase in in value or increase in production, ideally. And so, for a lot of this, the deep tech stuff that we work on and we develop, for example, the flux cables, there are avenues to get funding grant programs or or RD contracts. And and there's some value in that. Like let's say I had gone to a venture capitalist and and to get money to to fund the development of these. That's great. but some of these technical experts within these these agencies and and and programs within the federal governments, they actually have a pretty good sense of what's going to be valuable and what's not for the people and the the agencies they represent. And what that means is that when we get a proposal evaluated from them, and usually they send it out to experts, there is a reasonable expectation that when you're funded for that, there is a a vetting, like a a market vetting for the technology that comes along with that. That's valuable. It's valuable to us, it's valuable to them. Now, some VCs are are very technical and understand some of that stuff with respect to deep tech, and some are not. I'm not saying that you know, VCs are great and they do technical due diligence and they go out to experts as well. But but what we found is that that that going this route has helped focus us on. On some of the key things looking to scale up production of these flex cables. we may also want and need to reach out to investors to bring in that funding to to scale up manufacturing. all of the elements that goes into a robust manufacturing line. And that takes money, right? And but but in that case, I know exactly why I'm bringing that money in. It's it's to address needs of our customers who've given us a roadmap of, you know, next year at this time, we need so many cables per week production capacity. And and that I feel really good about going to a an investor and saying this is why we need
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: it's almost like a playbook that you're describing for innovators to to de-risk the technology far enough to seek the next level of funding for scaling, right? Which is when the governments will not step in at a higher TRL level. So I think that is pretty strategic and you know, smart off innovators like you. Like today, what do you need for you to scale up your cables? Is it a resource limitation, technician limitation, workforce other workforce limitation, capability, infrastructure?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, I mean it's it's a little bit of all of the above. to make more cables, we're gonna need more tools. And some of these tools are proprietary tools that we've built in house. it's not just we go out and buy a tool from whoever and put it in a line and away we go. We've got all the automation software, all of the components, putting it together, doing calibration, all that stuff. it takes work and it takes time. And you know, we need we need technicians, we need manufacturing technicians who understand what to do. And You know, again, we're doing things in a very unique way. It's not like we can go out and hire somebody who knows exactly what we're doing. And so we're we're developing, you know, training we're developing our our quality system saying this is the standard way of making this, doing this particular step of the process, and we do it that way every single time until we've identified an improvement. And then we swap that out. But but We need to do each of those steps exactly the same way. These are sensitive things that we're making. And if we don't maintain that, then our, you know, our quality suffers, our deal suffers. we need quality system engineers, we need manufacturing engineers, we need all of these, all these people. we need administrative people. experience with some of the technical the challenges of of of scaling up what is a really a deep tech technology it'd be great to find people like that marketing people that have a technical bent how do you find people who can communicate well something as complex as quantum computing to people who maybe aren't very familiar with quantum mechanics
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: And are you the only founder or do you have co founders first Nielsen Scientific?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: so I'm I'm I'm the only founder. We I have a great team and we've had some people who've worked with the company for a long time. but but I'm a I'm a sole founder.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: And how many employees do you have currently?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Let's see, we have we have nine right now. And we have some postings out. I think over the next little bit, we'll be hiring a few more technicians, at least two or three more engineers. And frankly, I need help on some administrative things as well.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: so who would be an ideal technician? how fast can they be trained? Do they have to be somebody who is hands-on would be just enough for this job?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: it would be nice if they had some experience in a clean room environment. Now a lot of what we do is is different than like what you might do in a traditional clean room for like semiconductor silicon processing. But some of the ways to keep them clean and uncontaminated, Just that that understanding is important. There are some hazardous chemicals and things that we work with, you know, so so people who've maybe been exposed to that, had some training that that that's definitely a plus. Although of course we do training around that as well. Important. You know, we have lasers, we operate them in safe ways, but still having some laser safety or laser experience could be useful. Again, not necessary, but being able to be very detail oriented. there's certain alignment steps between the layers that are really critical. And so being detail oriented and figuring out, okay, is that aligned or not? That's that's a key thing, but also just detail oriented to do the exact same thing every single time without skipping a step. which we've identified. And so like like that kind of attention and detail, that's that's really important. probably like my my hands tend to shake. I sometimes joke that I wouldn't be the best technician for our company, but but things like that, being able to handle handle things that have fine features and and sometimes requires like hand assembly at this stage. You know, some of these things will be automating in the future, but but but but being able to handle that kind of thing is important at this stage.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: So do you yourself show up in the lab putting things together or you're just the brains behind the standard operating procedures?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: I used to show up in the lab. I mean I mean for a couple of years, Nielsen Scientific had a head count of one. we had partners with universities and we had students actually one of the things that's been great with students is you can kind of expand or contract your workforce is necessary to a certain degree. That's very helpful.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Particularly for a small business who don't have to have too many people on the payroll, right?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, yeah. So so managing that, staying lean. I do go into the lab, but mostly I just because I enjoy the the team, you know, enjoy celebrating with them the successes that we have and we have engineers now who are really sharp and they're kind of in in the day to day details of of of you know addressing things, figuring things out, and and passing those on to technicians.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: how do you retain the talent? Like what are your potential risks? Going where the money is, following the money. Maybe somebody from from a different state or different nation would offer you a lapse space to scale this up. How do those those things happen for this technology? Are you there yet or not?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: I mean those things do happen. talking to some of our partners, we do see people getting poached from you know one you know from one team to another, or you know, one quantum team to another. you know, you see acquisitions, you know, a number of quantum computing companies have been pretty active in in the acquisition space. Part of that is I think to to bring in expertise, you know, as a way to to to get high performers that way. here's my philosophy as as a as a around retaining people. You know, I I definitely want to make sure that they are participating in the upside of the company. So you know everybody participates in in in the equity it's a different structure of how we're we're approaching it everybody participates in in the upside of the company. the other thing I think that is way more important is the company culture. I'm sure many people have had the experience where you've been in a company where the culture is There's a lot politics, there's a lot of backbiting or whatever. that's a miserable place to work. Finally. we have some core core values that are really actually meaningful. And those are include things like like service and solutions and respect, You know, they mean something to us, to the whole team. And so what that does is it sets the stage for this is the culture for for Nielsen Scientific. This is who we are, this is how we operate, and it's how we interact with each other. And it's created a beautiful culture and a wonderful team. they may get poached, they may go off and do something else, but for the most part, the team is really happy. In fact, I I think I think everybody loves being part of the team. And honestly, that's, that's, that's a really satisfying part my job is creating together with the team that kind of a environment and culture. None of it
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Great, great. any any developments that excite you for the next few years for Nielsen Scientific and generally this technology at large?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: this is a really exciting time for quantum computing, you know. So like we talked about how quantum computing in the past up until a year or so ago, maybe, it was about these hero demonstrations, you know, it was like a science project, you know, and and throwing everything you had at making a quantum computer that that could do quantum calculations with a hundred qubits or whatever. and and showing quantum advantage and and it's been an exciting time because people have have started to show that if you talk to people there is this transition from the idea that quantum computers are this unique science project you know to This is how quantum or how computing will go in the future. And that is exciting. And being a part of that is is just really, really exciting. we love to solve problems for people. And this is this is right down the road. And so we're we're really excited about these developments. we're excited to to be moving forward with this. And you know, I think one of the things that people don't understand about quantum computing so well is that it's not like classical computing where to double computing power you need an additional you know exact copy of a data center. To double a computing power of a quantum computer, you need one more qubit. And and that makes all the difference. it's been a pleasure talking with you, Dolly.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Absolutely. And any final advice for the students or engineers and also the investor community that might be watching? Do you have a message?
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: quantum, just like any other industry, has the needs of of every every industry, you know. Yeah, it needs the physicists who understand quantum mechanics, you know, to a very fine detail. But that's actually just a sliver of what the industry needs, you know. Like I said, we need manufacturing engineers, we need technicians, we need marketing people, we need, you know. Bookkeepers, right? We need the accountants. we need a way to figure out the finance side of all of this, you know. all of that, all, all aspects of of business are required. And there's many different ways of approaching that and solving those problems. And and I think being this is an opportunity to be to be creative, to really look at where the pain points are and the problems that need to be solved and think about, hey, am I the one to solve that? I think, I think, you know, like any newly launching industry that's that's a great time to to to create a new business and address problems
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Anything for the network at large
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: we very much like to partner with people let us know. we're we're very open. we are looking to expand and grow and and we'd love to make connections and and start talking with people about about that possibility as well. So
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Greg, thank you so much for joining me today on Quantum Ecosystem Conversation. It's been a pleasure learning about your remarkable journey from MIT to Sandia National Labs and founding Nielsen Scientific, helping you solve some of the technical challenges that will enable the next generation of quantum computing. Your story definitely reminds that innovation happens at every level of ecosystem and that transformative technologies are built not only by the companies that make headlines, but also by engineers, entrepreneurs, risk takers, and disruptors like yourself. thank you for sharing your expertise, your vision and passion and it's been truly an honor to have you today.
Greg Neilson, Ph.D.: Yeah, thank you, Dolan.
Dolly Chitta, Ph.D.: Thank you. Great.
