Overview
Public access to pulse-level and control-electronics interfaces in commercial quantum computing has bifurcated. The largest superconducting cloud platforms have closed access at this layer; IBM removed pulse-level control from all production QPUs in February 2025. Mid-tier superconducting vendors and the more open neutral-atom platforms have moved in the opposite direction. This paper documents the bifurcation row by row.
The paper surveys thirteen commercial vendors across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic modalities, grading each on six axes of openness at the control plane: the layer between gate-level circuit specification and physical control electronics.
The catalog ships as a separate machine-readable artifact under CC-BY-4.0, intended to be cited, forked, and updated as vendor access policies shift.
Submission status
Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering on 2026-05-18 (manuscript TQE-26-05-REG-0248).
Scope
| Dimension | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Vendors surveyed | 13 |
| Modalities | superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, photonic |
| Axes per vendor | 6 |
| Data cutoff | May 1, 2026 |
| Catalog artifact | Zenodo (CC-BY-4.0) |
Vendors include Atom Computing, Google, IBM, IonQ, IQM, OQC, ORCA, Pasqal, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, QuEra, Rigetti, and Xanadu.
What the paper does and does not do
The paper does not propose an architecture or a reference implementation. It describes what the field has lost as the access landscape has shifted, and what minimally open access at this layer would have to look like.
The grading rubric is intentionally narrow: each axis is graded only on public documentation, with per-cell URLs and accessed-on dates so the catalog can be re-graded as vendor policies change.
Disclosure
The author maintains an open-source pulse-control software project (QubitOS) that uses one of the vendor stacks surveyed here (IQM Resonance) as its primary integration target. No claim in the paper depends on or references that project, and the IQM row is graded only on public documentation against the same six-axis rubric applied to every other vendor.
Links
Citation
Malarchick, R. (2026). "Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing:
A Survey of Vendor Stacks and Field Implications." arXiv:2605.15233.