Intel shows mass production of qubits on 300mm wafers

Researchers in Europe have worked with Intel on mass production of quantum processing technology on 300mm wafers.

The process can fabricate more than 10,000 arrays with several silicon-spin qubits on a single wafer with greater than 95% yield. This achievement is dramatically higher in both qubit count and yield than the typical university and laboratory processes used today.

The team at QuTech, a collaboration of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), successfully created the first silicon qubits at scale at Intel’s D1 manufacturing factory in Hillsboro, Oregon.

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The quantum dots that are hosted at a Si/SiO2 interface and allow good tunnel barrier control—a crucial feature for fault-tolerant two-qubit gates. Single-spin qubit operation using magnetic resonance in the few-electron regime reveals relaxation times of over 1 s at 1 T and coherence times of over 3 ms.

The research waspublishedin the journal Nature Electronics and is Intel’s first peer-reviewed research demonstrating the successful fabrication of qubits on 300mm silicon.

The process uses all-optical lithography to produce silicon-spin qubits, the same equipment used to produce Intel’s CMOS chips. This is a key step forward for quantum processors, demonstrating that it’s possible for qubits to eventually be produced alongside conventional chips in the same industrial manufacturing facilities.