Quantum Computing

The claims are being written before the machines are finished.

Quantum patents are drafted against hardware that does not yet exist at scale. That makes enablement and written description the whole game — a claim has to reach the machine a client will actually ship years from now without reading on a physics paper published last week.

Published patents in this area: 196
Professionals: 17

Quantum computing appears in the practice descriptions of partners, associates and patent agents across the firm — the count is above, and every one of those profiles is filterable in the directory.

We work across the modalities rather than betting on one: superconducting and spin qubits, trapped ions, photonic architectures, and the neutral-atom and topological approaches behind them. Around the qubits sit the patents that often matter more commercially — cryogenic control electronics, readout and calibration, error correction and mitigation, compilers and transpilers, and the classical infrastructure that schedules the whole stack.

Two problems recur. Claim scope has to survive a modality shift, because a portfolio written tightly around one qubit technology is worth very little if the client's roadmap moves. And quantum algorithms draw Section 101 scrutiny in exactly the way software does, which means the specification has to frame a concrete improvement to the machine rather than a mathematical result. Both are drafting decisions made years before anyone tests them.

Drafting for a modality that may change

A quantum portfolio written tightly around superconducting transmons is worth a fraction of its cost if the client's roadmap moves to trapped ions or neutral atoms. The discipline is to identify what is genuinely modality-independent — the control scheme, the error-correction code, the calibration routine, the compiler pass — and claim at that level, then use dependent claims and continuations to reach the specific physical implementation.

That is not a hedge. It reflects where the commercial value in this field is actually accumulating: not in the qubit itself but in everything required to make a large number of them useful at once.

Section 101 and the quantum algorithm

A quantum algorithm looks, to an examiner applying Alice, a great deal like mathematics. The specification has to do the work of framing a concrete improvement to the operation of a machine — fewer gate operations, shorter coherence requirements, a measurable reduction in circuit depth — rather than presenting a result about complexity classes.

It is a frequent reason quantum applications receive eligibility rejections, and it is almost entirely determined at drafting time. By the time the rejection arrives, the specification either supports the argument or it does not.

Evidence

Patents we drafted in this area

Patents the firm prosecuted, drawn from its own published listing and from the USPTO's attorney-of-record index. A record, not a claim.

All patent listings

12,725,062Effective synchronous gates for rapid single flux quantum logic
12,725,061Optimize quantum-enhanced feature generation
12,718,130Scalable analog zero noise extrapolation by echo extension
12,700,538Enhancing qubit-qubit interactions between separate chips with spiral resonators
12,699,914Approximate quantum compiling with error mitigation
12,688,453Qubit state monitoring in quantum computers utilizing radio frequency superconducting quantum interference devices with classical computer readout and processing
12,682,264Quantum calculating thermalization rate and boltzmann sampling
12,675,721Qubit-selective tuning of two-level system in superconducting qubits via optical control