The NQCP ladder

This pathfinder framework is used as general reference for project management in NQCP.

We refer to 15 levels of R&D on our 'NQCP ladder' as a framework for mission driven project management - see left side of figure below. The top six levels (grey) spans from identifying life- and materials science problems of interest to circuit optimization and logic-level hardware resource estimates. 

The hardware R&D is organized into nine vertical levels (red), analogous to hardware technology readiness levels (TRLs) for the mission (referred to as the mission-TRL). A lower level can be seen as component of a higher level and each level has associated metrics of interest to evaluate performance, quality, speed and scale. Each level is further divided into horizontal sub-TRLs, as enabling technologies has their own performance metrics with increased requirements to enable going up the mission-TRL.