Insider Brief
- Diraq reported that it has successfully operated an eight-qubit silicon spin-qubit array fabricated using a standard 300 mm CMOS semiconductor manufacturing process, demonstrating a fourfold increase in array size without degrading coherence or control performance.
- The results, published in Nature Communications, show that larger silicon qubit arrays can maintain key performance metrics while using scalable manufacturing and readout techniques compatible with existing semiconductor fabrication.
- Diraq said the milestone advances its roadmap toward quantum processors with hundreds of qubits and ultimately more than one million qubits using conventional semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure.
PRESS RELEASE — Diraq today announced the publication of “Eight-Qubit Operation of a 300 mm SiMOS Foundry-Fabricated Device” in Nature Communications, marking another decisive step on the company’s roadmap toward utility-scale quantum computers based on silicon. The paper shows that quantum bits (qubits) designed and fabricated by imec using the same industry-standard process behind Diraq’s 2025 Nature breakthrough can now be coherently operated as a linear array several times larger than the original unit cell, with no loss of coherence.
The result is significant because it demonstrates that:
- CMOS-native manufacturing processes, which have been refined over decades by the semiconductor industry, can be used to produce quantum chips that scale reliably.
- Larger arrays of silicon spin qubits maintain good performance along key metrics (coherence, control quality, architectural scalability for readouts) that was first demonstrated in smaller, two-qubit arrays.
- This level of performance and manufacturability will scale as array sizes increase, enabling silicon spin qubits to make a commercially useful quantum computer.
With the successful result of scaling from two qubits to eight qubits, Diraq is currently working towards devices containing hundreds of qubits. This is part of the company’s overall roadmap to scale to thousands of qubits by 2029 and more than one million by 2031.
Building on a Strong Foundation
In September 2025, Diraq reported the manufacture of its patented silicon spin-qubit technology using imec’s 300 mm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) platform.
These two-qubit devices performed operations that consistently exceeded 99% fidelity, a key requirement for reliable quantum error correction.
Producing these devices demonstrated that Diraq’s qubits are fully compatible with standard semiconductor manufacturing — an advantage for scalability, economics, and deployment. Following the scaling patterns set by the semiconductor industry, CMOS-native quantum chips will be able to contain millions of qubits each, delivering quantum computers that are compact enough to be deployed in data centers worldwide, while leveraging existing manufacturing facilities.
A New Product Milestone
Now, less than a year from that initial result, today’s Nature Communications paper takes the same fabrication strategy and extends it by a factor of four in array size. The qubits, arranged as four pairs, were all successfully tuned and individually addressed, with single-qubit coherence times comparable to (and at the upper end of) the state of the art for the platform. Scaling the readout architecture for this larger array didn’t require a significant increase in sensor count, wiring density, or thermal load; this type of favorable scaling ratio points toward arrays that remain highly compact as they grow.
Adding qubits has historically required a new generation of hardware for other qubit modalities. This work demonstrates multiplicative scaling on the same wafer technology, achieved in under a year. Crucially, this type of scaling does not require larger machines: the physical footprint of Diraq’s utility-scale quantum computer will be no larger than the infrastructure required for this eight-qubit device.
“This is what an industrial pathway to quantum computing looks like,” said Andrew Dzurak, Founder and CEO of Diraq. “Nine months ago, we showed the world that our silicon qubits could be built reliably in imec’s 300 mm CMOS line. Today, we have scaled the size of the array using exactly the same process, with no compromise in coherence. This is the cadence we need to reach utility scale, and it is the type of cadence we expect to keep.”
