Comments on IBM’s Acquisition of the HRL Laboratories

IBM Quantum’s announcement about their intended acquisition of the HRL is quite important and a little surprising. But if you look at this further, there are good reasons why this makes a lot of sense. Here are our thoughts on this. If you look at the history of technology development, you will find that it is quite common for a new technology to start off with one type of implementation and then later transition to a much different implementation that provides improved cost, performance, or quality. A good example is the semiconductor industry which started with discrete bipolar germanium transistors, then transitioned to discrete bipolar silicon transistors, then bipolar integrated circuits, then NMOS. And now CMOS is the dominant, but not exclusive technology used for building a semiconductor. There…