Hooman Farkhani Receives Villum Experiment Grant to Explore Room-Temperature Quantum-Inspired Hardware
Associate Professor Hooman Farkhani has received DKK 2,249,000 from the Villum Foundation’s Villum Experiment programme for QUANTRONIC – a high-risk project exploring whether key mechanisms of quantum bits can be reproduced in spintronic hardware that works at room temperature.
Associate Professor Hooman Farkhani from SDU Microelectronics has been awarded a Villum Experiment grant from the Villum Foundation for QUANTRONIC: Spintronic Pseudo-Qubits for Room-Temperature Quantum Computing. The project explores a radically new approach to quantum-inspired computing: whether some of the key computational mechanisms of quantum bits can be reproduced using spintronic hardware operating at room temperature.
The project will develop a novel spintronic “pseudo-qubit” designed to mimic superposition-like states, probability-amplitude-based interference, and entanglement-like correlations without relying on fragile quantum coherence or cryogenic operation.
Spintronics between classical and quantum computing
By engineering and coupling nanoscale magnetic devices, the project will investigate a largely unexplored regime between classical probabilistic computing and quantum computing. If successful, it could establish a new class of scalable and manufacturable hardware building blocks for future quantum-inspired information processing.
The work connects to the section’s research in Advanced Computing, which explores computing paradigms beyond the conventional von Neumann architecture.
A high-risk Villum Experiment project
The project is highly exploratory and high-risk, which is central to the Villum Experiment programme: the aim is to test whether this unconventional concept is physically feasible and establish the first proof of concept.
About the grant
- Project: QUANTRONIC: Spintronic Pseudo-Qubits for Room-Temperature Quantum Computing
- Funding body: Villum Foundation – Villum Experiment 2026
- Grant amount: DKK 2,249,000
- Project period: 1 January 2027 – 31 December 2028
- Principal investigator: Associate Professor Hooman Farkhani, SDU Microelectronics
Congratulations to Hooman on this well-deserved grant! We look forward to following QUANTRONIC as it moves from a bold idea towards the first proof of concept.