A brief history of HRL Laboratories, one of the world’s most storied private research laboratories

Today, IBM announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire HRL Laboratories, a flagship research and development (R&D) institution.

We are extremely excited about this acquisition for its potential to accelerate and expand our quantum vision, thanks to HRL’s advanced expertise in silicon-spin qubit engineering that will complement and extend our long-term mission to scale powerful quantum computers.

But beyond today’s research, HRL is a storied institution with a nearly 80-year history, responsible for some of the most important scientific advances of the modern era. We are proud not only to welcome their expertise on cutting-edge technology, but to combine their enduring legacy with that of IBM Research.

Why was HRL founded?

HRL was founded as Hughes Research Lab by Howard Hughes’ Hughes Aircraft Company. The company was responsible for important aviation feats such as setting world records for the fastest aircraft. The company earned recognition for developing aircraft during World War II, most notably the plane holding the record for the world’s largest wingspan until 2019, the Hughes H-4 Hercules, commonly known as the Spruce Goose.

After the war, the company set its sights from aircraft to advanced electronics, and in 1948 launched the Hughes Research and Development Laboratories to push its ambitions forward. Its initial research focused on developing better wave tube transmitters and microwave maser receivers, and improving radar display devices.

What advances are HRL most famous for?

Perhaps Hughes Research Laboratories’ most important contribution to science is the invention of the laser. As early as 1917, Albert Einstein theorized that, using specially-tuned photons, you could stimulate an atom’s electron in an excited state to drop an energy level and release its own photon with an expected wavelength.

During the 1950s, physicists including Nikolay Basov, Alexander Prokhorov and Joseph Weber explored a tool using stimulated emission with multiple atoms to induce a chain reaction where those emitted photons stimulate further photon emission in their neighbors, causing a cascade that results in a coherent beam of electromagnetic energy. Their work led to the invention of microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation — the maser — which Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger built in 1953.

However, a higher-wavelength tool would be more useful for applications like spectroscopy, which uses electromagnetic radiation to probe the inner workings of molecules. While a host of labs competed to design and build such a device, it was ultimately Hughes Aircraft Company researchers Theodore Maiman, Irnee D'Haenens and Charles Asawa who first built the first laser and proved that the concept could actually work in 1960. Today, lasers are ubiquitous across science, defense, and consumer technology.

But the lab’s feats span far beyond the laser — HRL has pioneered a host of monumental technological advances, many without fanfare:

• In 1965, scientist Robert Bower updated the process to fabricate metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) field-effect transistors, using a self-aligned gate. This technology underlies all of today’s integrated circuits and allowed for the explosion of computational power in the following decades.
• Hughes Research Laboratories introduced the first liquid crystal light valve for large screen displays in 1969.
• Hughes Research Laboratories turbocharged fiber optics devices in the 1970s by developing custom optical fibers and integrated optical circuits.
• Hughes Research Laboratories has researched ion propulsion since the early 1960s, realizing a prototype in the 1990s that contributed to the first ion propulsion engine used on a satellite in 1997.
• In 1984, Hughes Research Laboratories created the software for the world's first autonomous navigation of cross-country terrain for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Autonomous Land Vehicle— a landmark in the history of artificial intelligence. ⠀

What does HRL do today?

General Motors acquired Hughes Aircraft Company in 1985, and in 1997 spun Hughes Research Laboratories into a new company, HRL Laboratories. Boeing acquired an interest in the company in 2000. Since then, the company has published over 1,100 patents, and has continued a legacy of delivering groundbreaking physics and engineering advances to realize technologies across the defense, aerospace, and automotive industries. These include:

• In the early 2000s, HRL published highly influential research in swarm robotics as part of the Pheromone Robotics Project, showing how many small robots could be programmed to act as a unit for tasks in surveillance, reconnaissance, hazard detection, and path finding.
• In 2011, HRL debuted ultralight metallic microlattices, some of the lightest materials ever engineered by humans. These materials could soon lead to potential applications as multifunctional structures such as shock absorbers capable of heat transfer or in energy storage devices.
• In 2012, HRL announced the development of an artificial synapse in the first functioning “memristor” array stacked on a conventional complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuit. Memristors act both as memory and logic like a human brain’s synapse.
• In the early 2020s, HRL has pursued curved imaging sensors including curved infrared sensors, enhancing imaging capability and reduced camera size—essentially recreating structures similar to those found in the human eye.
• HRL is a pioneer in quantum dot technology, or technology allowing for the capture and manipulation of single electrons. Quantum dots allowed HRL to demonstrate a digitally controlled silicon quantum processing unit comprising 56 quantum dots as 18 qubits — a groundbreaking feat in scalable quantum computing.

Today, HRL continues to perform cutting-edge research in semiconductor fabrication, materials science, sensing technology, and of course, quantum computing. These technologies well-complement IBM Research’s own 80 year history advancing hardware, algorithms, and fundamental science.

IBM Research is building the future of computing, now with HRL on our team. We’re excited to see what we can build together.