Rigetti granted $5.48M Air Force Office of Scientific Research award to develop ABAA chip-fabrication technology
On 2025-04-28 Rigetti announced a $5.48 million Air Force Office of Scientific Research award leading a consortium (Iowa State University, RMIT, University of Connecticut, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) to advance its Alternating-Bias Assisted Annealing (ABAA) chip-fabrication technique. ABAA applies alternating low-voltage pulses at room temperature to the Josephson-junction oxide barrier to precisely target qubit frequencies before packaging, aimed at improving two-qubit gate fidelity and scalability.
A U.S. defense research award funding a specific fabrication method tied to two-qubit gate fidelity is a meaningful, government-counterparty validation of Rigetti's manufacturing approach toward scalable superconducting processors.
Pairing Rigetti with LLNL and academic fab partners deepens its national-security R&D ties and could feed ABAA into future defense and federal procurement of superconducting hardware.