Intel launches its first quantum chip

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• Intel quantum chip released for academic use.
• The chip uses silicon spin qubits.
• It’s aimed at letting institutions complete quantum projects more easily.

Last week, Intel announced the availability of its first quantum chip called Tunnel Falls – its latest step on its road to quantum computing. The US semiconductor giant calls it a “development chip,” and it will not be available for sale. Instead, Intel will select academic and research partners willing to build quantum systems using the chip.

“Academic institutions don’t have high-volume manufacturing fabrication equipment like Intel. With Tunnel Falls, researchers can immediately begin working on experiments and research, instead of trying to fabricate their own devices,” Intel explained in a statement dated June 15, 2023.

The move means Intel wants universities and researchers to stop trying to build their own quantum processors and instead use its Tunnel Falls chip to test and develop software and hardware that work with it.

A more comprehensive range of experiments for the research community will be possible, including learning more about the fundamentals of qubits and quantum dots, and developing new techniques for working with devices with multiple qubits.

“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,” said Jim Clarke, director of quantum hardware at Intel. 

“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 fundamental questions and challenges must be solved along the path to a fault-tolerant quantum computer, the academic community can now explore this technology and accelerate research development.”

Intel added that it is already developing its next-generation quantum chip based on Tunnel Falls, whih it expects to release in 2024.

The first quantum chip spin qubit device by Intel

The 12-qubit device, fabricated on 300-millimeter wafers in the D1 fabrication facility, 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,” Intel said.

That means Intel is focused on silicon quantum dots, or what the company calls silicon spin qubits. This technology highly depends on CMOS semiconductor manufacturing technology, an Intel core competency, to isolate individual electrons and identify their states, such as spin-up or spin-down. 

As such, the technology can scale with semiconductor processes and packaging technology. In short, the semiconductor giant believes that using regular “classical” computing methods that helped the tech industry build the first mainframes and then personal computers in the 20th century is the best method for producing quantum computers.

“The vision in the future when there is a commercial product, is that you will need millions of qubits, and you will need to make a lot of them look like a central processing unit (CPU),” Intel’s senior device engineer Ravi Pillarisetty told The Standard. What’s more, 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 one million times shorter than other qubit types measuring approximately 50 nanometers by 50 nanometers, potentially allowing for efficient scaling,” Intel said in its blog posting.

Quoting Nature Electronics, Intel also iterated that “Silicon may be the platform with the greatest potential to deliver scaled-up quantum computing.”

Intel said it would send Tunnel Falls processors to a few universities, including the Universities of Maryland, Rochester, Wisconsin, and Sandia National Lab.