The 2026 Quantum Device Design Workshop opened Monday at UCLA, bringing together researchers from some of the world's leading institutions to tackle two of quantum computing's most stubborn challenges: superconducting qubit design and fault tolerance.
According to Tech Times, scientists from ETH Zurich, MIT, and UC Berkeley are on hand to teach graduate students the finer points of building and stabilizing the quantum hardware that underpins next-generation computing systems.
Superconducting qubits are currently the dominant hardware approach pursued by major players in the quantum race. They operate at temperatures colder than outer space and are notoriously fragile — tiny vibrations or electromagnetic interference can cause them to lose their quantum state, a problem known as decoherence. Fault tolerance refers to the engineering techniques that make quantum computers reliable enough to be useful despite these errors.
By pairing qubit design with fault tolerance in the same curriculum, the workshop reflects where the field stands: building better qubits matters, but so does building systems that can work even when individual qubits fail.
Graduate students are the explicit audience, signaling a deliberate push to grow the pipeline of specialized engineers and physicists the quantum industry will need in the years ahead.
As quantum hardware inches closer to practical use, workshops like this one are how the next generation of researchers learns to solve the problems standing between today's fragile prototypes and tomorrow's fault-tolerant machines.