Intel released Tunnel Falls, a 12-qubit quantum chip in silicon chip for the research community. Intel also announced a collaboration with the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) at the University of Maryland, College Park’s Qubit Collaboratory (LQC), a national-level Quantum Information Sciences (QIS) Research Center, to advance quantum computing research.
Fabricated on 300-millimeter wafers in the D1 fabrication facility, the 12-qubit device leverages Intel’s most advanced transistor industrial fabrication capabilities, such as extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) and gate and contact processing techniques. In silicon spin qubits, information (the 0/1) is encoded in the spin (up/down) of a single electron. Each qubit device is essentially a single electron transistor, which allows Intel to fabricate it using a similar flow to that used in a standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) logic processing line.
Intel believes silicon spin qubits are superior to other qubit technologies because of their synergy with leading-edge transistors. Being the size of a transistor, they are up to 1 million times smaller than other qubit types measuring approximately 50 nanometers by 50 nanometers, potentially allowing for efficient scaling.
“Tunnel Falls is Intel’s most advanced silicon spin qubit chip to date and draws upon the company’s decades of transistor design and manufacturing expertise. The release of the new chip is the next step in Intel’s long-term strategy to build a full-stack commercial quantum computing system. While there are still fundamental questions and challenges that must be solved along the path to a fault-tolerant quantum computer, the academic community can now explore this technology and accelerate research development,” stated Jim Clarke, director of Quantum Hardware, Intel.
