Intel: Our fabs can mass produce silicon qubit devices

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If conventional silicon manufacturing processes can be repurposed, it could help create practical quantum systems

www.theregister.com, Apr. 19, 2022 – 

UPDATED Intel and QuTech claim to have created the first silicon qubits for quantum logic gates to be made using the same manufacturing facilities that Intel employs to mass produce its processor chips.

The demonstration is described by the pair as a crucial step towards scaling to the thousands of qubits that are required for practical quantum computation.

According to Intel, its engineers working with scientists from QuTech have successfully created the first silicon qubits at scale at Intel's D1 manufacturing factory in Hillsboro, Oregon, using a 300mm wafer similar to those the company uses to mass produce processor chips.

QuTech is a partnership between Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) focused on quantum computing research.

The result is a process that could fabricate more than 10,000 arrays with several silicon-spin qubits on a single wafer with greater than 95 percent yield, Intel claims, stating that this is significantly higher in both qubit count and yield than current processes used to create qubits.

Quantum computing is still at a very early stage of development, but many of the architectures that researchers are experimenting with require a large number of qubits to ensure reliability. Also key is gate fidelity, a measure of how free from error individual qubits are.

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