Manufacture a qubit, the physical device that implements the minimum unit of information in the quantum computersit is not at all a piece of cake. There are several types: superconductors, ion traps, neutral atoms or ions implanted in macromolecules, among other variants. Not all of them are equally complexbut all are difficult to produce and manipulate. In fact, the ideal is to be able to manufacture them on a large scale in order to make possible the arrival of quantum machines equipped with many more qubits than the current ones.
The first step in this direction was taken by Intel and QuTech, the research institute specialized in quantum computing that belongs to the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands. At the end of March 2024 they announced that they had managed to produce the first qubit industrially and using the same processes and technology that is currently used for manufacture semiconductors.
However, it is now IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Center), the most experienced laboratory in the development of new integration and nanotechnology technologies that we have in Europe, which has signed a very important milestone: has managed to manufacture a qubit using extreme ultraviolet (UVE) and high aperture (High-NA) photolithography equipment from ASML. Currently this is integrated circuit manufacturing machine most advanced that exists.
Caressing the dream of industrial manufacturing of qubits for quantum machines
IMEC’s main laboratory resides in Leuven, Belgium and has collaborated closely with ASML for more than four decades. Thanks to this collaboration you have access to the most advanced lithography equipment of the Netherlands company. The qubit produced using ASML’s High-NA equipment is a silicon quantum dot spin type. These qubits are very interesting because they are considered the most promising candidates for industrial scaling. In fact, as IMEC assuresthey are known as “the qubits of industry.”
IMEC has shown that the manufacturing of these qubits is largely compatible with the production of CMOS chips
The really relevant news is that IMEC has demonstrated that the manufacturing of these qubits is largely compatible with the production of integrated circuits using CMOS technology (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor or complementary metal oxide semiconductor). And therefore it is possible manufacture them in conventional semiconductor plants. An important note: CMOS is the transistor manufacturing technology behind virtually all modern chips.
Sofie Beyne, the director of this project at IMEC, maintains that “We can leverage decades of semiconductor innovation and repurpose the entire silicon scale-up ecosystem, taking quantum devices beyond laboratory experiments into large-scale, fabricatable systems. This is where silicon-based qubits have a clear advantage.” Experts who research in the field of quantum computing they are convinced that having machines with millions of qubits will lead to the arrival of error correction technology, which is the holy grail of these computers.
Broadly speaking, silicon quantum dot spin qubits confine an electron within a silicon nanostructure, so that the spin state of the trapped electron is used to store quantum information. This architecture requires that the spaces between the different doors be minimal in order to reduce environmental noise and minimize errors. Be that as it may, what is really important is that IMEC has managed to manufacture a network of qubits with spaces of just 6 nm. Thanks to the nanoscale of this component, millions of qubits could theoretically be integrated into a single chip.
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