Quantum Hardware and its Applications with Quantum Inspire

Get hands-on with QuTech’s Quantum Inspire (QI) platform - one of the few publicly accessible quantum computing systems in Europe. This course covers quantum hardware fundamentals and teaches you to program and run quantum algorithms using cQASM (QuTech’s quantum assembly language) and the QI SDK.

Part of the Quantum Computer and Quantum Internet Applications professional certificate program from Delft University of Technology.

What you’ll learn

• Quantum hardware overview: the spin-qubit and superconducting quantum processors available through Quantum Inspire and their performance characteristics
• How real quantum processors differ from idealised circuit models: limited qubit connectivity, native gate sets, calibration drift, and measurement errors
• cQASM: QuTech’s quantum assembly language - register declarations, gate syntax, measurement commands, and classical control flow
• Writing cQASM programs by hand: the discipline of working at assembly level builds intuition for what quantum processors actually execute
• The Quantum Inspire SDK: the Python interface for submitting jobs, selecting backends (simulator or hardware), retrieving results, and processing histograms
• Quantum algorithm implementation in cQASM: translating abstract circuit descriptions into hardware-executable programs
• Noise and its effects: how gate errors and measurement errors change output histograms, and how to spot the difference between algorithmic and hardware effects
• Practical quantum programming strategies: decomposing gates to match the native gate set, routing circuits to respect connectivity, optimising circuit depth

Course structure

The course runs at four to five hours per week. The opening module provides a hardware landscape overview: what quantum processors Quantum Inspire makes available, what their qubit counts and connectivity graphs look like, and what noise characteristics to expect. This gives you the practical context before any programming begins.

The cQASM module introduces the language: data types, register declarations, gate syntax, and measurement operations. You write small cQASM programs by hand - Bell state preparation, simple single-qubit rotations - before using the SDK.

The Quantum Inspire SDK module covers the Python interface: how to instantiate a backend, submit a circuit, monitor job status, and retrieve and visualise results.

The algorithm implementation modules work through progressively more complex circuits: Bell state and GHZ state preparation, Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm, and Grover’s search on small instances. Each is implemented in cQASM, run on Quantum Inspire, and the measurement histogram is analysed.

EU participants (audit and verified) are eligible for a QTIndu certificate upon completion, funded under the European Union’s Digital Europe Programme (grant no. 101100757).

Who is this for?

• Software developers and engineers who want hands-on experience programming real quantum hardware rather than just academic simulators
• Quantum computing students who have done theory courses and want practical execution on actual hardware
• Network engineers and security professionals who want to experiment with quantum algorithms hands-on
• EU quantum technology professionals seeking QTIndu certification

Prerequisites

Python programming experience is required for the SDK exercises. Basic quantum computing knowledge - qubits, gates, circuits, superposition, entanglement, circuit notation - is needed from the outset. This is a practical programming course, not an introduction to quantum computing theory. The Quantum 101 courses from Delft or equivalent background is the right preparation.

Hands-on practice

This is a programming course built around actual quantum hardware access:

• Write cQASM programs that implement Bell state preparation and verify entanglement through correlating measurement outcomes
• Submit Grover’s search circuit to Quantum Inspire and observe the amplification effect in the output histogram
• Adapt a circuit to use only Quantum Inspire’s native gate set using manual gate decomposition
• Compare results from the noiseless simulator backend versus the noisy hardware backend and identify the differences
• Use the QI SDK to automate job submission and result processing from a Jupyter notebook

All work goes through the Quantum Inspire platform - no local quantum simulator required. EU participants qualify for QTIndu certification.

Why take this course?

Most quantum computing courses keep you in the realm of perfect, noiseless simulation. Quantum Inspire puts you on real quantum hardware (or high-fidelity hardware simulators) where you see the effects of noise, gate errors, and connectivity constraints firsthand.

Understanding these practical limitations is essential for anyone who wants to work in quantum computing rather than just study it. The difference between what a quantum circuit does in an ideal simulator versus on real hardware is not a minor technical detail - it is one of the central engineering challenges of the entire field.

QuTech’s Quantum Inspire is one of the few publicly accessible quantum computing platforms in Europe. Experience with the QI SDK is a practical skill that employers in the European quantum technology sector recognise.