Tech news in 3 minutes

UCLA’s $125M Semiconductor Hub: “We Want High Impact, Not Incremental Research”

35 d ago

At ITF World 2026, imec unveiled what it describes as the world’s first quantum dot qubit device fabricated using High-NA EUV lithography—bringing one of the semiconductor industry’s most advanced manufacturing tools into the fragile world of quantum computing.The demonstration used High-NA EUV lithography to fabricate silicon quantum dot spin qubits with gaps of approximately 6 nm between control gates—distances only a few dozen silicon atoms wide. Imec believes the tighter spacing improves qubit coupling and control while also pushing the devices closer to scalable semiconductor manufacturing techniques.But beyond the technical milestone itself, the work reflects a broader shift underway across the quantum industry: the transition from isolated physics demonstrations toward large-scale systems engineering. “You really see this transition from lab to fab happening worldwide,” Kristiaan De Greve, program director of quantum computing at imec and professor of electrical engineering at KU Leuven, told EE Times. The shift, he said, reflects a broader industry effort to move quantum devices out of isolated university-style experiments and into the highly controlled environment of advanced semiconductor manufacturing lines. By Vibheesh Bharathan, Director, Head of PSOC™ Multi-Sense MCUs, Infineon 06.15.2026 By GigaDevice 06.11.2026 By Marc Biehn, Head of Product Group Industrial Consumer Magnetic Sensing; Sebastian Maerz, Business Developer Magnetic Sensing, Infineon Technologies AG 06.09.2026 Kristiaan De Greve, quantum computing program director at imecFrom physics experiments to manufacturable systemsQuantum computing companies have spent much of the past decade demonstrating increasingly sophisticated qubits across a range of competing architectures, including superconducting systems, trapped ions, neutral atoms, photonics, and silicon spin qubits. The challenge is no longer proving that qubits can work individually, but scaling them into manufacturable systems containing potentially millions of interconnected devices. Most current quantum systems still operate with only hundreds of physical qubits—far short of the millions likely required for large-scale fault-tolerant machines.The need to scale is pushing the industry toward problems that look increasingly familiar to semiconductor engineers: interconnect density, control electronics, thermal management, manufacturability, packaging, and error correction overhead.“At this stage, we’re no longer talking about just one lab experiment and showing that this could work,” De Greve said. “We’re looking at a road to really making it work.”According to Sumit Kapur, CEO of Zapata Quantum, the broader industry is increasingly confronting the same transition from experimental systems toward scalable engineering.“For the past decade, the quantum industry has been focused on hardware specifications, such as the number of qubits, coherence times, and error rates,” he told EE Times. “But to reach widespread commercialization, we need to build, control, and operate these systems at scale. This is where manufacturability, systems integration, and the software stack become just as important as the physics.”Imec’s strategy is built around the idea that silicon spin qubits may ultimately benefit from the semiconductor industry’s decades-long investment in CMOS manufacturing, lithography, process control, packaging, and integration technologies.“If you can repurpose the entire semiconductor industry’s collective intelligence and tooling in a meaningful way, then you have the long-term runway to large-scale systems,” De Greve said.That positioning has helped silicon spin qubits earn a reputation in some parts of the industry as “the industry qubits” because they potentially align more naturally with existing semiconductor infrastructure.Still, the broader quantum industry remains divided across multiple competing hardware modalities, including superconducting systems, trapped ions, neutral atoms, and photonics.“We don’t think that it’s going to be one modality that wins the day,” Kapur said. “Some are faster, some have higher accuracy, some cost less, and their development and maturity curves are scaling at different levels.”The importance of High-NA EUV in imec’s announcement lies less in conventional transistor scaling than in something potentially more important for quantum computing: the ability to manufacture qubit structures with semiconductor-grade precision, reproducibility, and density.Silicon quantum dot qubits rely on extremely small and tightly controlled gate structures to confine and manipulate electrons. As the spacing between gates shrinks, coupling between neighboring quantum dots increases exponentially, improving controllability and performance.“The requirements to make these qubits with tight pitches and tight gate spacings can be addressed with an existing manufacturing method,” De Greve said.Previous demonstrations of similar structures often relied on electron-beam lithography, which provides high precision but is difficult to scale economically for large-volume manufacturing. High-NA EUV, by contrast, was originally developed to pattern the world’s most advanced AI and logic chips using machines the size of buses and optics engineered to atomic-scale precision.Quantum’s next bottleneck may be integrationThe qubits themselves are only part of the problem. As quantum systems scale, controlling and connecting large numbers of qubits becomes increasingly difficult, particularly inside dilution refrigerators operating at temperatures only fractions of a degree above absolute zero.One of the most pressing engineering challenges involves eliminating the dense forests of cables currently required to connect room-temperature electronics with cryogenic quantum systems.To address that problem, imec is working on cryogenic CMOS controllers, advanced 3D integration, and variants of hybrid bonding designed specifically for low-temperature operation. The organization has demonstrated tightly integrated cryogenic control modules bonded directly with qubit modules while attempting to minimize thermal interference and electrical noise.“We are putting a lot of effort into cryogenic CMOS—and into cryogenic 3D integration,” De Greve said.The research institute is investigating materials and integration approaches that electrically connect controllers and qubits while limiting heat transfer between temperature zones inside cryogenic systems. Superconductors and other specialized materials may help create thermal separation between qubit layers operating at millikelvin temperatures and control electronics operating at higher temperatures.Architecture and connectivity matter as well. De Greve described imec’s work on “multilinear arrays” and shuttling buses designed to improve connectivity between qubits while reducing some of the routing complexity associated with large-scale two-dimensional arrays. The work reflects a growing realization within the quantum industry that scaling challenges may depend as much on systems engineering as on the physics of individual qubits.Kapur said the industry still faces major challenges around “error correction that delivers high fidelities, finely tuned control electronics, distributed quantum networks, and of course, application software that takes full advantage of these complex systems.”Functioning array of qubits with gaps between plunger and barrier gates of barely 6 nm, enabled by High-NA EUV lithography (Source: imec)Quantum meets the semiconductor ecosystemThe industry’s thinking about quantum timelines is evolving as well.Five years ago, much of the sector focused heavily on NISQ (noisy intermediate-scale quantum systems) as a potential near-term commercial pathway. Increasingly, however, researchers are converging around the need for fully fault-tolerant architectures with large-scale quantum error correction.“I think we are now realizing that NISQ is likely not going to be the solution and that we need full error-corrected, fully fault-tolerant systems,” De Greve said.That shift further reinforces the importance of scalable manufacturing and integration because quantum error correction dramatically increases the number of physical qubits required to produce stable logical qubits.According to imec, scalable hardware capable of supporting efficient error correction may ultimately become one of the key differentiators in the industry.The implications extend well beyond quantum startups. If large-scale quantum systems ultimately depend on semiconductor-style manufacturing precision, then advanced lithography, packaging, cryogenic electronics, and heterogeneous integration could become strategic advantages in the quantum race—much as they already are in AI and high-performance computing.That potentially places organizations such as imec and companies such as ASML closer to the center of the long-term quantum hardware roadmap. “Given the need for manufacturing of large-scale systems, there is a big premium for a solid-state system,” De Greve said, pointing out that the winning architecture may be the one that can be manufactured most efficiently and reproducibly.But whether silicon spin qubits ultimately emerge as a dominant architecture remains uncertain. Multiple competing quantum approaches are still under active development. Imec’s work does suggest that the future of quantum computing may increasingly depend not only on advances in quantum physics, but also on the industrial disciplines that built the modern semiconductor industry itself.Read also: 3D INTEGRATION, CMOS, ERROR CORRECTION, EUV LITHOGRAPHY, HETEROGENEOUS INTEGRATION, HYBRID BONDING, ITF WORLD, QUANTUM COMPUTING, SEMICONDUCTORS, SILICON SPIN QUBITS IMEC