Intel says its latest quantum chip, the company saystunnel waterfall“No, no, it’s okay. Keep that dollar in your wallet and you’ll be fine. Intel isn’t in the commercialization stage yet. Instead, Tunnel Falls is intended to be a research test chip. It’s not yet It’s a stepping stone to a real Quantum’ future processing unit.
“Tunnel Falls is Intel’s most advanced silicon spin qubit chip to date, leveraging the company’s decades of transistor design and manufacturing expertise. It is the next step in Intel’s long-term strategy to build a commercial quantum computing system for the academic community, although there are still fundamental questions and challenges to be resolved along the way to a fault-tolerant quantum computer. will be able to explore this technology and accelerate its research and development in the future.” Jim Clark, Intel’s director of quantum hardware, said:
It may come as a shock to learn that Tunnel Falls is just a research test chip, but it’s also an often overlooked necessity for new technologies. Algorithms, learning and how-tos need to start today before doing any work inside the quantum computers of the future. One problem with that is that quantum computing hardware is difficult to manufacture. There’s a reason so few big companies, from Intel to Microsoft to IBM to IonQ to Google, are actively developing quantum computing hardware.
But this is exactly where Intel’s strategy of using silicon spin qubits is paying off big. It’s a quantum computing technology that can build on Intel’s years of chip manufacturing expertise, applying knowledge about what levers to move to improve yield. In fact, Intel says that in manufacturing Tunnel Falls he achieved a 95% yield with voltage uniformity similar to chips made with a more common CMOS process. According to the company, one of his 300mm wafers gives him 24,000 quantum dot test chips at his 95% yield.
“Because each qubit device is essentially a single-electron transistor, Intel manufactures the device using a flow similar to that used in standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) logic processing lines. can.”
This strategy has some expected scale advantages. Intel has one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing sites in the world. With the right tools and investments, the company has the trump card to quickly start manufacturing his QPUs. The first is the purpose of education, research and development. And finally to full-scale industrial production.
Intel’s choice of qubits aligns very well with state-of-the-art transistor fabrication. One of Tunnel Fall’s qubits is roughly the size of a transistor. That alone makes it up to a million times smaller than other qubit designs. And it turns out that the silicon spin qubit (where information (0/1) is encoded according to the spin properties of a single electron (up/down)) is one of the smallest possible variations of qubits. The fact that it did will no doubt help the company, too. It’s about packing the thousands, or millions, of them you need to unlock your quantum potential.
Intel’s Tunnel Falls has partnered with the University of Maryland’s Physical Sciences Laboratory (LPS) and the Qubit Collaborator in College Park.LQC), a national quantum information science (QIS) research center. As part of this partnership, Intel will join the Qubits for Computing Foundry (QCF) program in partnership with the U.S. Army Research Service to provide research laboratories with Intel’s new quantum chips.
Intel is adamant that it believes its silicon spin qubits are superior to other technologies. But of course, this analysis includes all the significance of Intel itself. What company wouldn’t want to extract so much value from the technology and expertise they already have?
