Marco Venere, a Ph.D. candidate in Information Technology at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering - Politecnico di Milano, earned second place at the PhD Forum of the Design Automation Conference (DAC) — one of the most prestigious international events in the field of electronic design automation — held on June 25, 2025, in San Francisco, California.

His research tackles one of the most pressing challenges in quantum computing: the reliability and efficiency of current quantum architectures. While quantum computing holds the promise of outperforming classical computation, its widespread adoption is hindered by hardware limitations, scarce resources, and high levels of noise during computations, all of which compromise its applicability to real-world tasks.

Venere’s work proposes an innovative approach: applying Electronic Design Automation (EDA) methodologies, developed and refined over decades in classical systems, to optimize every layer of the quantum computing stack. From low-level hardware management to compilation processes and algorithm design, the research offers a comprehensive and integrated perspective to make quantum computing more robust, scalable, and efficient.

The research was carried out in collaboration with Ph.D. student Beatrice Branchini, researcher Davide Conficconi, Prof. Donatella Sciuto, and Prof. Marco Santambrogio on the hardware side. For algorithm design, the contributions of Prof. Alessandro Barenghi and Prof. Gerardo Pelosi were fundamental.