Intel's Road to a Universal Quantum Computer Is Via Chiplets

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www.hpcwire.com, Oct. 11, 2022 – 

Quantum computers are being tested at some of the world's top high-performance computing centers, which are wading through different systems and approaches to find the best fit for their infrastructure.

A battle for quantum superiority is now emerging around the mass production of quantum chips, which can be challenging given that qubits can be notoriously unstable and difficult to scale to millions of qubits required for universal quantum computers.

But Intel claimed to solve some of those issues in a limited test. The chipmaker was able to produce stable quantum dots in its existing factories, which is a milestone in the company's long-term goal to build a universal quantum computer. The company used a testing device called a "cryoprober" to isolate and investigate the uniformity of quantum dots on its wafer.

In the process, Intel has claimed an early lead on manufacturing quantum systems. Intel's pivot to manufacturing with advanced packaging provides a pathway to build more complex computing systems such as quantum devices, analysts said.

"We are making these quantum dots – good quantum dots – hand over foot. We're making them across the wafer. We have high yield. We're able to characterize all of them so we get statistics. This is unheard of, at least to our knowledge in the quantum community," James Clarke, director of quantum hardware at Intel, told HPCwire.

The company hopes by next year to deliver early quantum hardware to Argonne National Laboratory, which is testing quantum hardware from different vendors as part of a U.S. Department of Energy initiative called Q-Next. The U.S. government is prioritizing quantum hardware as part of an ongoing computing supremacy race with China, which is also advancing its quantum computing ambitions.

The Intel milestone was a small step, but it serves as a measure on the yield and viability of mass manufacturing quantum chips. The Intel team isolated 12 quantum dots and four sensors, but the goal is to replicate that on a larger scale.

"This is certainly one of the hard parts, but now we have to grow this device. We have to make it larger, to get the qubits working together. This is still part of a 10-year journey. But we're well on our way, we know what tools we have in the toolbox," Clarke said.

Like IBM and Google, Intel is chasing a universal quantum computer, which researchers agree will require more than a million qubits. Google and IBM are chasing superconducting qubits, which can be hard to manufacture on existing processes. Intel's quantum computing system is based on quantum dots with chips that can be made in its existing factories.

"Our qubits look a lot like transistors. It's far less of a stretch to see how we would go from a transistor to the Intel spin qubit," Clarke said.

For quantum to be relevant, it has to be built in large volumes, and Intel has a keen appreciation for that in a way many organizations don't, said David Kanter, principal analyst at Real World Technologies.

"I don't think there's really a consensus in the industry about the right approach to quantum," Kanter said, adding that "having internal manufacturing is good for new device types."

To get to logical qubits that are stable and fault tolerant, it is going to take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of raw qubits, said Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

"To get this to the end, scaling is important," Krewell said.

With quantum, ideally the qubits are as identical as possible and 300mm wafers and more advanced lithography tools have the best overlay capabilities, said Dylan Patel, the founder of SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor research and consulting firm.

"It's hard for other fabs to be able to have access to the most precise tools unless they also have an advanced logic semiconductor business," Patel said.

Intel has one advantage among companies in the quantum race because they can pattern more accurately with their most advanced tools which are designed for leading-edge angstrom era semiconductors, Patel said.

In the early days of quantum computing, IBM and D-Wave bickered over the superiority of their qubit. IBM accused D-Wave's quantum annealer system – which is being used by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany for optimization – of not being a real quantum computer. D-Wave's computer is now widely viewed as a small-scale quantum computer that is efficient at optimization as opposed to being a full-fledged quantum computer.

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