Bringing diamond into the semiconductor supply chain
As Quantum Brilliance starts delivery of its diamond-based room temperature quantum computer systems, it is working with European research group imec on ways to integrate more technology on chip.
“We are in delivery mode now, to the Fraunhofer IAF, then we will focus on shipping three systems to Oak Ridge in the US,” Andrew Dunn, chief operating officer at Quantum Brilliance tells eeNews Europe.
The company worked with Fraunhofer IAF on the underlying technology, where the nitrogen vacancies are created in diamond to an accuracy of less than one nanometre using scanning probe microscopy as part of the DE-Brill project. Another team at the Institute for Quantum Optics of Ulm University worked on defining scalable readout and control techniques for diamond-based qubits, which will allow their precise operation.
“What we are focussing on now, including with Oak Ridge, is to put more and more on chip,” said Dunn.
That includes an €18m project to develop a chip, and a €35m project in Germany to develop a genuinely portable quantum computer, rather than the 19in rack systems it has today for its 2 qubit machines. The aim is to develop quantum processors with 100 qubits that can sit alongside CPUs or GPUs on cards in a server, or even in a vehicle.
The company is based in Australia and Germany and uses nitrogen vacancies to create qubits, but this can also be used for sensors.
“Something we have not really talked about is sensor and the fundamental building block for us is a sensor., This is really timely for us, as to integrate more you have to bring diamond into the semiconductor supply chain.
“Sensing is already has an identifiable value opportunity and we have had conversations with foundry partners on sensing. Some of the IP we are going to create for the on chip quantum computer is very applicable to sensing.”
“We are close discussion with imec on getting diamond Into standard fab processes, handling, lithography. To get a rudimentary process flow for a sensor would be closer to 12 months with clear goals. It has been a long time coming and we don’t see any reason why trhere will be incompatibilities.
“I would see us as providing anything from material all the way up to modules but not the full sensor solutions and we are already beginning to do that, defence is one of the early adopters.
“For example there was a paper in January with a quantum computer next to a quantum sensor and in theory you can get a tremendous benefit by using a single qubit
“I would love it if we were providing QPUs in a package for people putting them on boards next to CPUs or GPUs with tens or hundreds qubits, I think that’s a really good outcome for us. The chip is where a lot of the IP is and this is what people will want.”
“Personally I want to make quantum really boring and invisible, just another chip doing its job, and that’s our approach. Most of the things around the chip are standard off the shelf. For example within the 19in rack there is a standard PC and GPU and there’s a bit of cleverness in the control system.”
The emerging deal with imec aims to integrate diamond into a CMOS process, but if that doesn’t work out then there are standard photonics processes that are likely to work for production in Europe.
“The intention is to be as compatible as with CMOS as possible, what metals will work for diamond, and there are a number of them,” he said. “imec are spinning up a 12in plant in Spain for photonics and should our process not be CMOS compatible there are other places such as the plant in Malaga. They are an ideal partner to work with.”
“The way we are right now we have our value chain partners in Europe, we have customers in the US on compute and sensing. We are not going ot the US immediately and its on the radar but you have to be ready. We don’t need to go to the US today, our key partners are in Europe today.
This is for NISQ-type devices rather than fault tolerant quantum systems, with 25 to 50 qubits on a chip planned over the next 3 years, stretching to 64. “We will now more over the coming year.”
“We do have a roadmap to fault tolerance but we are not worrying about that at the moment,” he said. “One of the challenges has been partly on the education side. People think of millions of qubits, but that will be very expensive and power hungry. I think getting an understanding of having 100qubits in a car cheaply and simply. The use cases are very different, we are on a different path. We will achieve usefulness earlier as our use cases are different.”
He points to AI inference, dealing with sparse, noisy data, as an example. “We have done a study for he Australian Army on this on the accuracy and speed.
The mobile system with Germany will have more integration and will be different form the previous systems with 10s of qubits and will resemble more and more silicon chips, he says.
In the meantime various institutions around the world are testing out the technology for various applications. The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF is using the second-generation Quantum Development Kit (QB-QDK2.0) with the Qristal open source SDK and Qristal Emulator, which allow users to simulate quantum computing back-ends with realistic noise models powered by Nvidia’s CUDA-Q platform.
The QB-QDK2.0 is a hybrid quantum-classical compute node that integrates classical co-processors, including Nvidia GPUs, as well as CPUs, alongside Quantum Brilliance’s quantum processor (QPU), all in a single box. This architecture allows users to explore different depths of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms, such as quantum machine learning techniques that combine quantum and classical neural networks.
At Oak Ridge, the systems will be use din parallel to tackle bigger problems such as molecular modelling. “The reason they are buying three systems is they want to investigate parallelisation of systems,” said Dunn.
The company is now setting up an office in Tokyo, Japan, to work with local banks. Hideaki Yoshimura, Quantum Brilliance’s Japan Country Director, relocated to Tokyo from Sydney, Australia in April 2025 to establish the local operations and start building a value chain there.
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