Today, Intel announced the release of its newest quantum research chip, Tunnel Falls, a 12-qubit silicon chip, and it is making the chip available to the quantum research community. In addition, Intel is collaborating 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.
“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.”–Jim Clarke, director of Quantum Hardware, Intel
Currently, 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. As a result, a wider range of experiments become possible, including learning more about the fundamentals of qubits and quantum dots and developing new techniques for working with devices with multiple qubits.
To further address this, Intel is collaborating with LQC as part of the Qubits for Computing Foundry (QCF) program through the U.S. Army Research Office to provide Intel’s new quantum chip to research laboratories. The collaboration with LQC will help democratize silicon spin qubits by enabling researchers to gain hands-on experience working with scaled arrays of these qubits. The initiative aims to strengthen workforce development, open the doors to new quantum research and grow the overall quantum ecosystem.