Over the past several years, the JKU Institute of Integrated Circuits and the LIT Correct and Secure System Lab have been paving the way to create methods to "program" quantum computers. They have now received an award in recognition of their outstanding work.

There is no doubt that in the near future and when it comes to certain tasks, quantum computers will replace conventional computers. This makes it more crucial than ever to create base foundations as to how these kinds of machines will be "programmed" correctly in the future. For a number of years now, JKU Computer Science has been working on methods that could also be used directly for quantum computers, i.e. by IBM and Google. The corresponding findings have been published regularly in leading journals and conferences and "JKQ" has established itself as the JKU platform to support the design of quantum computers.

A team led by Prof. Robert Wille (head of the Institute of Integrated Circuits / LIT Correct and Secure System Lab, and Academic Director at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg) was presented with the Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award at the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design. Presented annually by the leading professional journal in the field of computer-aided design, the award is presented in recognition of outstanding work conducted over the past two years. The Linz paper was selected out of close to 500 papers; 14 of those papers were shortlisted.