Quantum Computer Chips Clear Major Manufacturing Hurdle

A startup has proven its silicon quantum chips can be manufactured at scale without losing precision.

UNSW Sydney startup Diraq has demonstrated that its quantum chips are not only effective in controlled laboratory conditions but also maintain performance when manufactured in real-world production. The chips consistently achieve 99% accuracy, a benchmark considered essential for making quantum computers practical.

To reach this milestone, Diraq partnered with the European research institute Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (imec). The collaboration confirmed that the chips deliver the same high reliability when produced through standard semiconductor fabrication processes as they do in UNSW’s research labs.

According to UNSW Engineering Professor Andrew Dzurak, founder and CEO of Diraq, it had not previously been shown that the level of accuracy achieved in laboratory prototypes—known in quantum computing as fidelity—could be successfully reproduced in large-scale manufacturing.

“Now it’s clear that Diraq’s chips are fully compatible with manufacturing processes that have been around for decades.”

Global Benchmarks

In a paper published in Nature, the teams report that Diraq-designed, imec-fabricated devices achieved over 99% fidelity in operations involving two quantum bits – or ‘qubits’. The result is a crucial step towards Diraq’s quantum processors achieving utility scale, the point at which a quantum computer’s commercial value exceeds its operational cost. This is the key metric set out in the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program run by the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to gauge whether Diraq and 17 other companies can reach this goal.

Utility-scale quantum computers are expected to be able to solve problems that are out of reach of the most advanced high-performance computers available today. But breaching the utility-scale threshold requires storing and manipulating quantum information in millions of qubits to overcome the errors associated with the fragile quantum state.

“Achieving utility scale in quantum computing hinges on finding a commercially viable way to produce high-fidelity quantum bits at scale,” said Prof. Dzurak.

“Diraq’s collaboration with imec makes it clear that silicon-based quantum computers can be built by leveraging the mature semiconductor industry, which opens a cost-effective pathway to chips containing millions of qubits while still maximizing fidelity.”

Silicon’s Edge in Quantum Development

Silicon is emerging as the front-runner among materials being explored for quantum computers – it can pack millions of qubits onto a single chip and works seamlessly with today’s trillion-dollar microchip industry, making use of the methods that put billions of transistors onto modern computer chips.

Diraq has previously shown that qubits fabricated in an academic laboratory can achieve high fidelity when performing two-qubit logic gates, the basic building block of future quantum computers. However, it was unclear whether this fidelity could be reproduced in qubits manufactured in a semiconductor foundry environment.

“Our new findings demonstrate that Diraq’s silicon qubits can be fabricated using processes that are widely used in semiconductor foundries, meeting the threshold for fault tolerance in a way that is cost-effective and industry-compatible,” Prof. Dzurak said.

Diraq and imec previously showed that qubits manufactured using CMOS processes – the same technology used to build everyday computer chips – could perform single-qubit operations with 99.9% accuracy. But more complex operations using two qubits that are critical to achieving utility scale had not yet been demonstrated.

“This latest achievement clears the way for the development of a fully fault-tolerant, functional quantum computer that is more cost effective than any other qubit platform,” Prof. Dzurak said.

Reference: “Industry-compatible silicon spin-qubit unit cells exceeding 99% fidelity” by Paul Steinacker, Nard Dumoulin Stuyck, Wee Han Lim, Tuomo Tanttu, MengKe Feng, Santiago Serrano, Andreas Nickl, Marco Candido, Jesus D. Cifuentes, Ensar Vahapoglu, Samuel K. Bartee, Fay E. Hudson, Kok Wai Chan, Stefan Kubicek, Julien Jussot, Yann Canvel, Sofie Beyne, Yosuke Shimura, Roger Loo, Clement Godfrin, Bart Raes, Sylvain Baudot, Danny Wan, Arne Laucht, Chih Hwan Yang, Andre Saraiva, Christopher C. Escott, Kristiaan De Greve and Andrew S. Dzurak, 24 September 2025, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09531-9

Funding: University of New South Wales

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