Introducing Hardware Pre-Flight: Validate Before Fabrication

QuantufAI Labs ·

Fabricating a quantum chip is a slow, expensive way to find out whether a design works. Hardware Pre-Flight exists to move as much of that discovery as possible in front of tape-out, where a design change is an edit rather than a new fabrication run.

What Pre-Flight does

Pre-Flight builds a digital twin of a proposed quantum processor — a simulation model of its physical characteristics and constraints — and runs decoder-aware tests against it. Decoder-in-the-loop matters because a qubit layout that looks fine in isolation can behave very differently once error correction is running on top of it: the decoder's per-round behavior is part of the system, not an afterthought.

The output is a Test Card: an auditable report covering threshold maps, predicted error rates, and throughput metrics for the design as simulated. "Auditable" is the operative word — every figure on a Test Card is traceable to the simulation that produced it, so a go/no-go decision can be interrogated rather than taken on faith.

What Pre-Flight does not claim

These are simulation results, and we label them that way. A digital twin predicts how a design should behave under the modeled physics; it does not certify how fabricated silicon will behave in a dilution refrigerator. The value is in ordering and filtering: designs that fail in simulation can be revised before anyone pays for a mask, and designs that pass arrive at fabrication with a documented, testable set of expectations.

We deliberately do not attach dollar or schedule savings to that. What a Test Card saves depends entirely on what it catches, and that is different for every design.

Where it fits in the platform

Pre-Flight sits at the front of the same pipeline as the rest of the platform: validate a design against its twin, then — once hardware exists — track how the real device's calibration telemetry compares with what the twin predicted. That closing of the loop between predicted and observed behavior is the long-term point of doing pre-flight validation at all.

Test Card figures are simulation predictions, not measured hardware results.

— QuantufAI Labs