The European Commission has announced that it is investing €3 million in developing the first-ever quantum chip that combines electronics and light using advanced Germanium-Silicon technology.
www.newelectronics.co.uk/, Jan. 23, 2025 –
Supported by the Quantum Flagship, the ONCHIPS consortium is laying the foundations for a new type of quantum hardware with advanced materials that have never been combined before.
The team hope to make quantum computers more practical for real-world applications and enable them to solve challenging problems – unlocking new possibilities for science, industry, and everyday users.
The ONCHIPS team is turning to Germanium-Silicon (GeSi) – a material whose ability to emit light efficiently was only discovered in 2020.
Quantum computers are set to be exceptionally powerful tools but researchers seeking to scale them up to the size face significant hurdles, particularly when it comes to their fundamental building blocks, or 'qubits.'
"One major issue of scalability is that qubits are often limited in their ability to interact with one another," explained project coordinator Professor Floris Zwanenburg, full professor at the University of Twente's MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology. "As the number of qubits increases, effective communication between them becomes more complex."
Germanium-Silicon (GeSi), however, presents a viable solution to overcome these bottlenecks.
"We are combining spin qubits for computation and photonics for communication on a GeSi platform that is compatible with traditional CMOS manufacturing, which could be a total game-changer for scaling quantum computers. By combining spin qubits (electrons) with photonic communication (light), the chip bridges the gap between processing quantum information and transmitting it over long distances. This will significantly help us solve a major bottleneck in quantum scalability," Professor Zwanenburg said.