SPROUT

A scalable platform for quantum technologies

Quantum technologies and their commercial exploitation are among the most important development areas for the coming decades. While significant progress has been made in researching quantum effects, the complexity of current cryogenic cooling solutions has continued to limit their adoption and scaling for commercial applications.

To address this challenge, Delft Circuits and kiutra partnered on the SPROUT project, which was launched in 2021.

The goal of the project was to provide a fully integrated, turnkey cooling platform as the go-to solution for quick and reliable testing of components and for building multi-node quantum networks. To achieve this, the team set out to develop a platform capable of reaching temperatures as low as 50 mK without relying on expensive and scarce helium-3, while incorporating integrated electronics to support quantum experiments.

A significant milestone was reached when a temperature of 20 mK was successfully measured at kiutra’s lab testbed. The platform also offered extensive wiring capacity while retaining enough cooling power to operate quantum devices, including quantum computing chips based on superconducting qubits.

Delft Circuits played a crucial role as an ideal and essential partner, contributing their innovative high-performance cabling. Their cabling design provided a space-saving solution with low heat load, which was vital to the project’s success. The cryostat was integrated into a compact 19″ rack-sized format, making it suitable for deployment in data center environments.

The results of the project were published in Review of Scientific Instruments in 2026. The paper presents a compact, fully cryogen-free continuous ADR platform operating continuously below 30 mK and designed to host a small-scale superconducting QPU within a single rack-mounted system.

With this publication, the SPROUT project reached its conclusion, demonstrating that continuous magnetic cooling can deliver the stability, performance, and integration density required for superconducting quantum computing and other ultra-low-temperature applications without relying on scarce cryogenic resources.