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Entegris Inc. (Nasdaq: ENTG) announced today the grand opening of its expanded, state-of-the-art clean manufacturing facility in Kulim, Malaysia. With a $30M USD investment, Entegris has increased the manufacturing capacity of the Kulim facility by 30%, ensuring the company is a steadfast partner for the leading semiconductor makers for years to come.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is having a massive impact on IC manufacturing. New technologies are requiring an enormous number of chips and a greater emphasis on the performance and reliability of those chips.  “This new standard calls on solutions that will enable the future of technology and we are seeing this through the increase in demand for our leading wafer handling products” said Bertrand Loy, president and CEO, Entegris. “To meet this surge, we have expanded our Kulim manufacturing capacity and capabilities, adding new tooling, molding machines, and numerous updates to the assembly area to create a superior and unparalleled manufacturing facility.”

“This expanded state-of-the-art clean manufacturing facility enables Entegris to support wafer and reticle handling demand on a global basis for leading nodes now and into the future,” said Bill Shaner, senior vice president of Advanced Materials Handling Division, Entegris. “This expansion clearly aligns with the evolving needs of the industry addressing both the high demand for our award-winning FOUPs and also the emergent need for Entegris’s ASML-qualified EUV reticle pods, which are critical for logic makers adopting the most advanced lithography processes.”

Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, are working to develop a method to convert water and carbon dioxide to the renewable energy of the future, using the energy from the sun and graphene applied to the surface of cubic silicon carbide. They have now taken an important step towards this goal, and developed a method that makes it possible to produce graphene with several layers in a tightly controlled process.

Jianwu Sun at Linköping University inspecting the growth reactor for growth of cubic silicon carbide. Credit: Thor Balkhed/LiU

The research group has also shown that graphene acts as a superconductor in certain conditions. Their results have been published in the scientific journals Carbon and Nano Letters.

Carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. These are the three elements you would get if you took apart molecules of carbon dioxide and water. The same elements are the building blocks of chemical substances that we use for fuel, such as ethanol and methane. The conversion of carbon dioxide and water to renewable fuel, if possible, would provide an alternative to fossil fuels, and contribute to reducing our emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Jianwu Sun, senior lecturer at Linköping University, is trying to find a way to do just that.

The first step is to develop the material they plan to use. Researchers at Linköping University have previously developed a world-leading method to produce cubic silicon carbide, which consists of silicon and carbon. The cubic form has the ability to capture energy from the sun and create charge carriers. This is, however, not sufficient. Graphene, one of the thinnest materials ever produced, plays a key role in the project. The material comprises a single layer of carbon atoms bound to each other in a hexagonal lattice. Graphene has a high ability to conduct an electric current, a property that would be useful for solar energy conversion. It also has several unique properties, and possible uses of graphene are being extensively studied all over the world.

In recent years, the researchers have attempted to improve the process by which graphene grows on a surface in order to control the properties of the graphene. Their recent progress is described in an article in the scientific journal Carbon.

“It is relatively easy to grow one layer of graphene on silicon carbide. But it’s a greater challenge to grow large-area uniform graphene that consists of several layers on top of each other. We have now shown that it is possible to grow uniform graphene that consists of up to four layers in a controlled manner”, says Jianwu Sun, of the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at Linköping University.

One of the difficulties posed by multilayer graphene is that the surface becomes uneven when different numbers of layers grow at different locations. The edge when one layer ends has the form of a tiny, nanoscale, staircase. For the researchers, who want large flat areas, these steps are a problem. It is particularly problematic when steps collect in one location, like a wrongly built staircase in which several steps have been united to form one large step. The researchers have now found a way to remove these united large steps by growing the graphene at a carefully controlled temperature. Furthermore, the researchers have shown that their method makes it possible to control how many layers the graphene will contain. This is the first key step in an ongoing research project whose goal is to make fuel from water and carbon dioxide.

In a closely related article in the journal Nano Letters, the researchers describe investigations into the electronic properties of multilayer graphene grown on cubic silicon carbide.

“We discovered that multilayer graphene has extremely promising electrical properties that enable the material to be used as a superconductor, a material that conducts electrical current with zero electrical resistance. This special property arises solely when the graphene layers are arranged in a special way relative to each other”, says Jianwu Sun.

Theoretical calculations had predicted that multilayer graphene would have superconductive properties, provided that the layers are arranged in a particular way. In the new study, the researchers demonstrate experimentally for the first time that this is the case. Superconducting materials are used in, among other things, superconducting magnets – extremely powerful magnets found in magnet resonance cameras for medical investigations, and in particle accelerators for research. There are many potential areas of application for superconductors, such as electrical supply lines with zero energy loss, and high-speed trains that float on a magnetic field. Their use is currently limited by the inability to produce superconductors that function at room temperature: currently available superconductors function only at extremely low temperatures.

A team of scientists has created the world’s most powerful electromagnetic pulses in the terahertz range to control in fine detail how a data-storage material switches physical form. This discovery could help find a way to scale down memory devices, eventually revolutionizing how computers handle information.

Compact discs might be falling out of fashion, but they may have inspired the next generation of computer nanotechnology. A glass layer in CDs consists of a phase-change material that can be encoded with information when light pulses cause crystals in small regions of the layer to either grow or melt.

Phase-change materials triggered by electrical impulses — rather than light — would offer new memory technologies with more stable and faster operation than that possible in many current types of memory devices. In addition, downscaling memory sites in phase-change materials could increase memory density. But this remains challenging because of the difficulty of controlling the crystal growth — crystallization — and melting — amorphization — processes.

Addressing this issue in an article in Physical Review Letters, a team of scientists led by Kyoto University observed nanometer-scale growth of individual crystals in a phase-change material composed of germanium, antimony and tellurium — or GST — after applying high-powered terahertz pulses as a trigger.

“One reason crystallization and amorphization of GST under an electric field are difficult to control is the heat diffusion effects in the micrometer scale associated with electrical inputs, which also contribute to the crystallization,” explains group leader Hideki Hirori. “Fortunately, terahertz technologies have matured to the point where we can use short pulses to generate strong electric fields while suppressing heating effects.”

Hirori and his coworkers developed a terahertz pulse generator that delivered ultra-short and highly intense terahertz pulses across a pair of gold antennas. These pulses created an electric field in the GST sample comparable to that of an electrically switched device. Importantly, this approach greatly reduced the heat diffusion because of the extremely short duration of terahertz pulses — around 1 picosecond, or 10?12 s — enabling fine control over the rate and direction of GST crystallization. A region of crystallization grew in a straight line between the gold antennas in the direction of the field, at a few nanometers per pulse.

When the team tracked stepwise changes in crystallization while increasing the number of terahertz pulses, they were surprised to find that after a certain point, crystal conductivity rapidly sped up instead of rising in line with the increase in terahertz strength. The researchers hypothesize that electrons jumping between states in the crystal added an unexpected source of heat to the system, boosting crystallization.

Hirori explains: “Our experiment reveals how nanoscale and direction-controlled growth of crystals in GST can be achieved. We also identified a phenomenon which should assist in the design of new devices and ultimately realize the fast and stable digital information handling potential that this material promises.”

When two atomically thin two-dimensional layers are stacked on top of each other and one layer is made to rotate against the second layer, they begin to produce patterns — the familiar moiré patterns — that neither layer can generate on its own and that facilitate the passage of light and electrons, allowing for materials that exhibit unusual phenomena. For example, when two graphene layers are overlaid and the angle between them is 1.1 degrees, the material becomes a superconductor.

“It’s a bit like driving past a vineyard and looking out the window at the vineyard rows. Every now and then, you see no rows because you’re looking directly along a row,” said Nathaniel Gabor, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Riverside. “This is akin to what happens when two atomic layers are stacked on top of each other. At certain angles of twist, everything is energetically allowed. It adds up just right to allow for interesting possibilities of energy transfer.”

This is the future of new materials being synthesized by twisting and stacking atomically thin layers, and is still in the “alchemy” stage, Gabor added. To bring it all under one roof, he and physicist Justin C. W. Song of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, have proposed this field of research be called “electron quantum metamaterials” and have just published a perspective article in Nature Nanotechnology.

“We highlight the potential of engineering synthetic periodic arrays with feature sizes below the wavelength of an electron. Such engineering allows the electrons to be manipulated in unusual ways, resulting in a new range of synthetic quantum metamaterials with unconventional responses,” Gabor said.

Metamaterials are a class of material engineered to produce properties that do not occur naturally. Examples include optical cloaking devices and super-lenses akin to the Fresnel lens that lighthouses use. Nature, too, has adopted such techniques – for example, in the unique coloring of butterfly wings – to manipulate photons as they move through nanoscale structures.

“Unlike photons that scarcely interact with each other, however, electrons in subwavelength structured metamaterials are charged, and they strongly interact,” Gabor said. “The result is an enormous variety of emergent phenomena and radically new classes of interacting quantum metamaterials.”

Gabor and Song were invited by Nature Nanotechnology to write a review paper. But the pair chose to delve deeper and lay out the fundamental physics that may explain much of the research in electron quantum metamaterials. They wrote a perspective paper instead that envisions the current status of the field and discusses its future.

“Researchers, including in our own labs, were exploring a variety of metamaterials but no one had given the field even a name,” said Gabor, who directs the Quantum Materials Optoelectronics lab at UCR. “That was our intent in writing the perspective. We are the first to codify the underlying physics. In a way, we are expressing the periodic table of this new and exciting field. It has been a herculean task to codify all the work that has been done so far and to present a unifying picture. The ideas and experiments have matured, and the literature shows there has been rapid progress in creating quantum materials for electrons. It was time to rein it all in under one umbrella and offer a road map to researchers for categorizing future work.”

In the perspective, Gabor and Song collect early examples in electron metamaterials and distil emerging design strategies for electronic control from them. They write that one of the most promising aspects of the new field occurs when electrons in subwavelength-structure samples interact to exhibit unexpected emergent behavior.

“The behavior of superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene that emerged was a surprise,” Gabor said. “It shows, remarkably, how electron interactions and subwavelength features could be made to work together in quantum metamaterials to produce radically new phenomena. It is examples like this that paint an exciting future for electronic metamaterials. Thus far, we have only set the stage for a lot of new work to come.”

Gabor, a recipient of a Cottrell Scholar Award and a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Azrieli Global Scholar Award, was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program and a National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research CAREER award.

SEMI announced today that it has signed a new agreement with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to expand the Nano-Bio Materials Consortium’s (NBMC) work in advancing human monitoring technology innovations for telemedicine and digital health. The program is designed to include $20 million in direct federal funding and $41 million overall in the next six years with additional contributions from state and industry sources. The grant guarantees $7 million of government funds for the first year’s launch of the renewed program.

Drawing on elements of nano-technology and biological research, nano-bio technology is at the core of the expanding field of human performance monitoring and augmentation (HPM/A). Human performance monitoring systems focus on using wearables and table-top devices that monitor blood pressure and glucose, the heart and brain, and other key features of human health to assess physical performance, identify anomalies and help prevent disease.

The expanded NBMC program will focus on research topics such as individual or mission customization, non-intrusive electronics, effects of extreme environments, new material integration (nano-materials, textiles, etc.), and regulatory considerations. Activities will consist of competitively bid research and development (R&D) projects, workshops, conferences, webinars, and extensive gap analysis exercises to determine market needs.

“SEMI is eager to renew NBMC programs and begin working with AFRL, commercial organizations, and universities to identify technology needs, fund research and development, and execute this public/private collaboration,” said Melissa Grupen-Shemansky, Ph.D, NBMC executive director and SEMI CTO. “The NBMC’s continued work will give SEMI members a first-hand understanding of how medical technology innovations will be shaped by advanced electronics and provide the platform for collaboration on R&D projects leading to new products and enabling personalized medicine.”

“Since its inception, NBMC has enabled new industrial and academic communities to engage and team up with AFRL and our mission to deliver new and innovative human monitoring capabilities to the airmen,” said Jeremy W. Ward, Ph.D., NBMC Government Program Manager. “We are eager to continue fostering and growing this community of innovators and to focus R&D on emerging nano-bio materials and technologies for human monitoring to enable solutions for the future monitoring and diagnostic needs of the United States Air Force’s Aeromedical En Route Care mission.”

AFRL awarded the cooperative agreement to SEMI after reviewing competitive responses to a Request for Information followed by a Request for Proposals. Twelve organizations joined SEMI to write the comprehensive proposal: Binghamton University, Brewer Science, Cambridge Display Technology, Dublin City University, GE, Lockheed Martin, Molex, NextFlex, Qualcomm Life Sciences, UCLA Medical School, UES, and the University of Arizona. SEMI and its FlexTech Group have been collaborating with AFRL and its Materials and Manufacturing Directorate to manage NBMC since its launch in 2013.

A team of scientists from Siberian Federal University (SibFU) together with foreign colleagues described the structural and physical properties of a group of two-dimensional materials based on polycyclic molecules called circulenes. The possibility of flexible design and variable properties of these materials make them suitable for nanoelectronics. The results are published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C.

Circulenes are organic molecules that consist of several hydrocarbon cycles forming a flower-like structure. Their high stability, symmetricity, and optical properties make them of special interest for nanoelectronics especially for solar cells and organic LEDs. The most stable and most studied tetraoxa[8]circulene molecule could be potentially polymerized into graphene-like nanoribbons and sheets. The authors have published the results of simulations proving this possibility. They also described properties and structure of the proposed materials.

“Having only one building block – a tetraoxa[8]circulene molecule – one can create a material with properties similar to those of silicon (a semiconductor traditionally used in electronics) or graphene (a semimetal) depending on the synthesis parameters. However, the proposed materials have some advantages. The charge carrier mobility is about 10 times higher compared to silicon, therefore, one could expect higher conductivity,” says the main author of the study Artem Kuklin, research associate at the department of theoretical physics of Siberian Federal University.

Having the equilibrium geometries and tested their stability, the scientists discovered several stable tetraoxa[8]circulene-based polymers. The difference between them lied in the type of coupling between the molecules resulting in different properties. The polymers demonstrate high charge carrier mobility. This property was analyzed by fitting of energy zones near bandgap – a parameter represented by separation of empty and occupied electronic states. The mechanical properties exhibit that the new materials 1.5-3 times more stretchable than graphene. The authors also emphasized existence of topological states in one of the polymers caused by spin-orbit coupling, which is not typical for light elements-based materials. The materials possessed such kind of properties are insulators in the bulk but can conduct electricity on the surface (edges).

“The proposed nanostructures possess useful properties and may be used in various fields, from the production of ionic sieves to elements of nanoelectronic devices. Further we plan to develop this topic and modify our compounds with metal adatoms to study their magnetic and catalytic properties. We would also like to find a research group that could synthesize these materials,” concludes Artem Kuklin.

Two-dimensional magnetism has long intrigued and motivated researchers for its potential to unleash new states of matter and utility in nano-devices.

In part the excitement is driven by predictions that the magnetic moments of electrons – known as “spins” – would no longer be able to align in perfectly clean systems. This enhancement in the strengths of the excitations could unleash numerous new states of mater, and enable novel forms of quantum computing.

A key challenge has been the successful fabrication of perfectly clean systems and their incorporation with other materials. However, for more than a decade, materials known as “van der Waals” crystals, held together by friction, have been used to isolate single-atom-thick layers leading to numerous new physical effects and applications.

Recently this class has been expanded to include magnetic materials, and it may offer one of the most ambitious platforms yet in scientific efforts to investigate and manipulate phases of matter at the nanoscale, researchers from Boston College, the University of Tennessee, and Seoul National University, write in the latest edition of the journal Nature.

Two-dimensional magnetism, the subject of theoretical explorations and experimentation for the past 80 years, is enjoying a resurgence thanks to a group of materials and compounds that are relatively plentiful and easy to manipulate, according to Boston College Associate Professor of Physics Kenneth Burch, a first author of the article “‘Magnetism in two-dimensional van der Waals materials.”

The most oft-cited example of these materials is graphene, a crystal constructed in uniform, atom-thick layers. A procedure as simple as applying a piece of scotch tape to the crystal can remove a single layer, providing a thin, uniform section to serve as a platform to create novel materials with a range of physical properties open to manipulation.

“What’s amazing about these 2-D materials is they’re so flexible,” said Burch. “Because they are so flexible, they give you this huge array of possibilities. You can make combinations you could not dream of before. You can just try them. You don’t have to spend this huge amount of time and money and machinery trying to grow them. A student working with tape puts them together. That adds up to this exciting opportunity people dreamed of for a long time, to be able to engineer these new phases of matter.”

At that single layer, researchers have focused on spin, what Burch refers to as the “magnetic moment” of an electron. While the charge of an electron can be used to send two signals – either “off” or “on”, results represented as either zero or one – spin excitations offer multiple points of control and measurement, an exponential expansion of the potential to signal, store or transmit information in the tiniest of spaces.

“One of the big efforts now is to try to switch the way we do computations,” said Burch. “Now we record whether the charge of the electron is there or it isn’t. Since every electron has a magnetic moment, you can potentially store information using the relative directions of those moments, which is more like a compass with multiple points. You don’t just get a one and a zero, you get all the values in between.”

Potential applications lie in the areas of new “quantum” computers, sensing technologies, semiconductors, or high-temperature superconductors.

“The point of our perspective is that there has been a huge emphasis on devices and trying to pursue these 2-D materials to make these new devices, which is extremely promising,” said Burch. “But what we point out is magnetic 2D atomic crystals can also realize the dream of engineering these new phases – superconducting, or magnetic or topological phases of matter, that is really the most exciting part. It is not just fundamentally interesting to realize these theorems that have been around for 40 years. These new phases would have applications in various forms of computing, whether in spintronics, producing high temperature superconductors, magnetic and optical sensors and in topological quantum computing.”

Burch and his colleagues – the University of Tennessee’s David Mandrus and Seoul National University’s Je-Geun Park – outline four major directions for research into magnetic van der Waals materials:

  • Discovering new materials with specific functionality. New materials with isotropic or complex magnetic interactions, could play significant roles in the development of new supercondcutors.
  • These new materials can also lead to a deeper understanding of fundamental issues in condensed matter physics, serving as unique platforms for experimentation.
  • The materials will be tested for the potential to become unique devices, capable of delivering novel applications. The two-dimensional structure of these materials makes them more receptive to external signals.
  • These materials possess quantum and topological phases that could potentially lead to exotic states, such as quantum spin liquids, “skyrmions,” or new iterations of superconductivity.

Germano Iannacchione, a National Science Foundation (NSF) program officer who oversees grants to Burch and other materials scientists, said the co-authors offer the broader community of scientists ideas that can serve to guide a dynamic field pushing beyond boundaries in materials research.

“Magnetism in 2D van Der Waals materials has grown into a vibrant field of study,” said Iannacchione. “Its investigators have matured from highly focused researchers to statesmen shepherding a field, broadening applications into as many channels as possible. The review captures the multiplicative aspect of steady, focused, and sometimes risky research that opens vast new frontiers, with tremendous potential for applications in quantum computing and spintronics.”

Rudolph Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: RTEC) today announced the availability of its NovusEdge™ system for edge, notch and backside inspection of unpatterned wafers. The company plans to ship multiple systems totaling more than $3M by year end to fill existing orders from two customers. The new system is the result of a multi-year collaboration with bare wafer manufacturing partners that require one inspection tool capable of detecting defects near the wafer’s edge, bevel, back-side and notch. The NovusEdge system meets the stringent new requirements for defect control at the edge and backside of wafers being manufactured for 10nm process nodes. The system provides up to 50 percent faster throughput and two orders of magnitude better edge sensitivity than incumbent technology.

“Gartner estimated the unpatterned wafer inspection market at over $400M in 2017,” Tim Kryman, senior director of product marketing explained. “The bulk of this is focused on finding front surface defects as small as 10nm. However, our development partners also required tighter defect control at the wafer bevel and backside, to ensure the stringent quality standards required for these process nodes.  We estimate the NovusEdge system’s addressable market at 15 – 20 percent of the overall unpatterned market.”

The NovusEdge system uses multiple cameras and advanced imaging technologies to build a high-resolution, composite image of the entire wafer bevel then applies sophisticated analytical routines to identify and classify defects as small as the sub-micron level. On the backside it utilizes high-speed laser-scanning to detect particles, scratches, area defects and haze.

Netronome today announced an open architecture for domain-specific accelerators designed to significantly reduce the burgeoning cost of silicon development as demanded by modern data center server, edge computing and automotive applications. Decades of progress with general-purpose CPUs has slowed while performance requirements of workloads have catapulted, driving significant demand in domain-specific accelerators. With current approaches applied to developing and manufacturing domain-specific accelerator silicon, only the largest companies serving the highest volume markets can sustain the needed investment. Netronome is collaborating with six leading silicon companies, Achronix, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Kandou, NXP, Sarcina and SiFive, to develop an open architecture and related specifications for developing chiplets that promise to reduce silicon development and manufacturing costs.

The silicon industry is undergoing a sea change as a result of multiple forces. Firstly, the demise of Moore’s Law and secondly, the growth of compute-intensive specialized applications (e.g., machine learning, security, networking) are driving the need for domain-specific architectures that drastically impact the economics of silicon development and ROI. Thirdly, the increasing size and complexity of silicon adversely impact development costs and manufacturing yields, and finally, requirements such as significantly reduced latency, form factor and power requirements are becoming critical (e.g., with edge computing).

The open domain-specific accelerator architecture being developed in the ODSA Workgroup enables the chiplet-based silicon design to be composed using best-of-breed components such as processors, accelerators, and memory and I/O peripherals using optimal process nodes. The open architecture will provide a complete stack of components (known good die, packaging, interconnect network, software integration stack) that lowers the hardware and software costs of developing and deploying domain-specific accelerator solutions. Implementing open specifications contributed by participating companies, any vendor’s silicon die can become a building block that can be utilized in a chiplet-based SoC design.

“The end of Moore’s Law will increase the use of domain-specific accelerators to meet power-performance requirements in cloud infrastructure, network infrastructure and IoT/wireless edge applications,” said Bob Wheeler, principal analyst, The Linley Group. “With its modular approach, the open domain-specific accelerator architecture could change the chiplet paradigm from single-vendor solutions to a world of choice, thereby enabling OEMs and operators to develop and deploy advanced SoC solutions.”

“Netronome’s domain-specific architecture as used in its Network Flow Processor (NFP) products has been designed from the ground up keeping modularity, and economies of silicon development and manufacturing costs as top of mind,” said Niel Viljoen, founder and CEO at Netronome. “We are extremely excited to collaborate with industry leaders and contribute significant intellectual property and related open specifications derived from the proven NFP products and apply that effectively to the open and composable chiplet-based architecture being developed in the ODSA Workgroup.”

“The use of AI and the need for power-efficient, high-throughput parallelism is driving the growth of accelerators. However, the high cost and complexity of accelerator development is a major factor restraining growth,” said Steve Mensor, vice president of marketing at Achronix. “We are delighted to join and bring our embedded FPGA technology to the ODSA Workgroup to enable customers to bring open, cost-efficient accelerator products to market.”

“To meet current and future growth demands, network providers need a more efficient approach to satisfy the needs of a wide range of data center applications,” said Kevin O’Buckley, general manager ASIC Business Unit at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “Our collaboration efforts with the ODSA Workgroup ensure an additional option to enable data center SoC accelerator technology supporting applications from deep learning for artificial intelligence to next-generation 5G networks.”

“Kandou’s Glasswing USR SerDes was designed to be the enabling interface for heterogeneous chiplet architectures in a shared MCM package,” said Amin Shokrollahi, founder and CEO at Kandou. “With unprecedented bandwidth and ultra-low power, Glasswing enables companies to quickly and efficiently build flexible yet optimized solutions for workload-specific applications. Kandou supports the ODSA Workgroup and delivering Glasswing as a critical component.”

“NXP strongly supports development of chiplet technology in support of domain-specific acceleration for multiple markets,” said Sam Fuller, director of marketing at NXP. “NXP is pleased to join the ODSA Workgroup and provide its Multicore Arm® SoC solutions to enable low-power, low-latency, open accelerator solutions that deliver greater cost and performance efficiencies.”

“Sarcina provides complex high-speed and high pin-count packaging solutions for leading fabless semiconductor companies,” said Larry Zu, Ph.D., president at Sarcina Technology LLC. “We are pleased to join the ODSA Workgroup and offer a packaging service for the open data center accelerator prototype that can accelerate the time-to-package while lowering the total cost.”

“A ‘one size fits all’ architecture approach to data center workloads will not deliver the required performance and efficiency,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO at SiFive. “We are pleased to be a member of the ODSA Workgroup and look forward to SiFive’s leading RISC-V Core IP being available in chiplet form, potentially via our silicon capabilities, to enable customers to create open, heterogeneous, best-in-class accelerators at low cost.”

Quantum computers that are capable of solving complex problems, like drug design or machine learning, will require millions of quantum bits – or qubits – connected in an integrated way and designed to correct errors that inevitably occur in fragile quantum systems.

Now, an Australian research team has experimentally realised a crucial combination of these capabilities on a silicon chip, bringing the dream of a universal quantum computer closer to reality.

They have demonstrated an integrated silicon qubit platform that combines both single-spin addressability – the ability to ‘write’ information on a single spin qubit without disturbing its neighbours – and a qubit ‘read-out’ process that will be vital for quantum error correction.

Moreover, their new integrated design can be manufactured using well-established technology used in the existing computer industry.

The team is led by Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, a program leader at the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) and Director of the NSW node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility.

Last year, Dzurak and colleagues published a design for a novel chip architecture that could allow quantum calculations to be performed using silicon CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) components – the basis of all modern computer chips.

In their new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, the team combine two fundamental quantum techniques for the first time, confirming the promise of their approach.

Dzurak’s team had also previously shown that an integrated silicon qubit platform can operate with single-spin addressability – the ability to rotate a single spin without disturbing its neighbours.

They have now shown that they can combine this with a special type of quantum readout process known as Pauli spin blockade, a key requirement for quantum error correcting codes that will be necessary to ensure accuracy in large spin-based quantum computers. This new combination of qubit readout and control techniques is a central feature of their quantum chip design.

“We’ve demonstrated the ability to do Pauli spin readout in our silicon qubit device but, for the first time, we’ve also combined it with spin resonance to control the spin,” says Dzurak.

“This is an important milestone for us on the path to performing quantum error correction with spin qubits, which is going to be essential for any universal quantum computer.”

“Quantum error correction is a key requirement in creating large-scale useful quantum computing because all qubits are fragile, and you need to correct for errors as they crop up,” says lead author, Michael Fogarty, who performed the experiments as part of his PhD research with Professor Dzurak at UNSW.

“But this creates significant overhead in the number of physical qubits you need in order to make the system work,” notes Fogarty.

Dzurak says, “By using silicon CMOS technology we have the ideal platform to scale to the millions of qubits we will need, and our recent results provide us with the tools to achieve spin qubit error-correction in the near future.”

“It’s another confirmation that we’re on the right track. And it also shows that the architecture we’ve developed at UNSW has, so far, shown no roadblocks to the development of a working quantum computer chip.”

“And, what’s more, one that can be manufactured using well-established industry processes and components.”

CQC2T’S UNIQUE APPROACH USING SILICON

Working in silicon is important not just because the element is cheap and abundant, but because it has been at the heart of the global computer industry for almost 60 years. The properties of silicon are well understood and chips containing billions of conventional transistors are routinely manufactured in big production facilities.

Three years ago, Dzurak’s team published in the journal Nature the first demonstration of quantum logic calculations in a real silicon device with the creation of a two-qubit logic gate – the central building block of a quantum computer.

“Those were the first baby steps, the first demonstrations of how to turn this radical quantum computing concept into a practical device using components that underpin all modern computing,” says Professor Mark Hoffman, UNSW’s Dean of Engineering.

“Our team now has a blueprint for scaling that up dramatically.

“We’ve been testing elements of this design in the lab, with very positive results. We just need to keep building on that – which is still a hell of a challenge, but the groundwork is there, and it’s very encouraging.

“It will still take great engineering to bring quantum computing to commercial reality, but clearly the work we see from this extraordinary team at CQC2T puts Australia in the driver’s seat,” he added.

Other authors of the new Nature Communications paper are UNSW researchers Kok Wai Chan, Bas Hensen, Wister Huang, Tuomo Tanttu, Henry Yang, Arne Laucht, Fay Hudson and Andrea Morello, as well as Menno Veldhorst of QuTech and TU Delft, Thaddeus Ladd of HRL Laboratories and Kohei Itoh of Japan’s Keio University.

COMMERCIALISING CQC2T’S INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

In 2017, a consortium of Australian governments, industry and universities established Australia’s first quantum computing company to commercialise CQC2T’s world-leading intellectual property.

Operating out of new laboratories at UNSW, Silicon Quantum Computing Pty Ltd (SQC) has the target of producing a 10-qubit demonstration device in silicon by 2022, as the forerunner to creating a silicon-based quantum computer.

The work of Dzurak and his team will be one component of SQC realising that ambition. UNSW scientists and engineers at CQC2T are developing parallel patented approaches using single atom and quantum dot qubits.

In May 2018, the then Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) addressing a new collaboration between SQC and the world-leading French research and development organisation, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA).

The MoU outlined plans to form a joint venture in silicon-CMOS quantum computing technology to accelerate and focus technology development, as well as to capture commercialisation opportunities – bringing together French and Australian efforts to develop a quantum computer.

The proposed Australian-French joint venture would bring together Dzurak’s team, located at UNSW, with a team led by Dr Maud Vinet from CEA, who are experts in advanced CMOS manufacturing technology, and who have also recently demonstrated a silicon qubit made using their industrial-scale prototyping facility in Grenoble.

It is estimated that industries comprising approximately 40% of Australia’s current economy could be significantly impacted by quantum computing.

Possible applications include software design, machine learning, scheduling and logistical planning, financial analysis, stock market modelling, software and hardware verification, climate modelling, rapid drug design and testing, and early disease detection and prevention.