Imec and Diraq hit industrial-scale milestone for silicon quantum chips

Imec and Australian startup Diraq have shown that qubits fabricated via industrial silicon chip processes can reach error rates low enough to enable quantum error correction, a critical threshold on the path to utility-scale quantum computing. Their devices, made with Imec’s 300mm spin-qubit platform for silicon quantum-dot structures, achieved over 99 percent two-qubit gate fidelity and up to 99.9 percent for state preparation and measurement operations.

Unlike many prior demonstrations where only the “best” devices are shown, Imec and Diraq tested randomly selected chips and achieved reproducible, high-performance metrics across multiple devices – validating the scalability of their approach. The work was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

“For the first time, silicon MOS-based quantum-dot spin-qubit devices realized with industrial manufacturing techniques perform as well as academic hero devices. This shows that Imec’s 300mm process flow for MOS-based quantum-dot structures enables a low-noise qubit environment, resulting in high fidelity values for a set of critical qubit operations. The methods used and insights gained from it also show us that there’s further room for fidelity improvement,” says Kristiaan De Greve, fellow and program director for quantum computing at Imec.

Sydney-based Diraq is a spinout from the University of New South Wales and specializes in silicon-based spin qubits compatible with existing CMOS technologies.