Quobly & Hon Hai Research Institute open source toolbox for Quantum Phase Estimation
Fault-tolerant quantum computing could be on the way.
French silicon-based quantum computing company Quobly is working with Taiwan’s Hon Hai Research Institute, the R&D arm of Hon Hai Technology Group to release an open source numerical toolbox.
In software development, a numerical toolbox is a reusable library of pre-compiled mathematical algorithms and functions used to perform complex computations, such as linear algebra, numerical integration, and statistical data analysis.
The technology is jointly developed by the two partners, dedicated to the Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) algorithm, said to be “a cornerstone of fault-tolerant quantum computing” with major applications in quantum chemistry and materials science.
QPE is widely regarded as a key algorithm for computing ground-state energies of molecular systems on future fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Asymptotic cost scalings
While its theoretical properties and asymptotic cost scalings (how a software algorithm’s consumption of computational resources – like execution time or memory- increases as the input data size approaches infinity, typically measured using a Big O notation.) are well understood, practical resource estimates and realistic performance trade-offs remain largely unexplored, due to the difficulty of simulating QPE beyond toy models.
The newly released toolbox aims to bridge this gap by providing researchers with a practical environment to explore QPE implementations and their resource implications, with a strong focus on understanding algorithmic building blocks and their practical implementation constraints.
“Our goal is to provide a practical, numerical playground for QPE, one that helps researchers move beyond purely theoretical cost models and develop realistic intuition for fault-tolerant quantum algorithms,” said Thibaud Louvet, quantum algorithms scientist at Quobly.
The QPE Toolbox is designed to give quantum algorithm practitioners a hands-on, numerical understanding of the full QPE workflow, from chemistry preprocessing to phase estimation, in a regime that challenges classical simulation while remaining computationally tractable.
Hamiltonian encoding strategies
Rather than attempting to simulate early fault-tolerant quantum computers, which are by nature beyond classical reach, the QPE Toolbox focuses on practical, interpretable numerical experiments in regimes accessible to classical computation, where algorithmic choices, initialisation fidelity, and Hamiltonian encoding strategies can be explored in detail.
As all good quantum engineers know, Hamiltonian encoding maps optimisation or quantum chemistry problems into a quantum system’s energy matrix (Hamiltonian), ensuring the problem’s optimal solution corresponds to the system’s lowest energy state (ground state).
“By combining state-of-the-art quantum algorithms with advanced tensor-network techniques, this toolbox offers researchers a structured environment to explore and better understand the practical requirements of future quantum applications,” said Min-Hsiu Hsieh, director of the Quantum Computing Research Center at Hon Hai Research Institute.
The first release is designed as an educational and exploratory framework, enabling researchers to build intuition around the practical implementation of QPE and its variants.
The QPE Toolbox is released as open source and is intended to evolve with the community. Future developments will include variational circuit synthesis, compressed fermionic encodings, and larger-scale tensor-network simulations.
The jointly developed software is free for use by academics and researchers and the toolbox is available on GitHub here.
