Quantum chips can now be made on ordinary assembly lines

Quantum computers have long promised to solve problems that are far too complex for today's computers — from designing new medicines to breaking modern encryption. But there's a catch: nobody has figured out how to build one big enough to actually do that. Now, a group of researchers says they've taken an important step toward solving that problem using the same kind of factories that already make the chips inside your phone and laptop.

Researchers from imec, a Belgian semiconductor research organization, and Diraq, an Australian quantum computing company, have now built a working set of eight qubits — out of silicon, using a standard industrial chip-making process known as 300mm CMOS. This is essentially the same type of factory production line used to mass-produce the ordinary computer chips found in everyday electronics.

What are qubits, and why are they so hard to build?

Regular computers store information as bits — simple 1s and 0s. Quantum computers use "qubits," which can represent much more complex information by exploiting the strange rules of quantum physics. In theory, stringing together enough qubits gives a computer enormous power. In practice, qubits are incredibly fragile and difficult to manufacture reliably, especially as you try to connect more and more of them together.

Most attempts to build qubits today happen in specialized laboratories, using painstaking, one-at-a-time methods that are nearly impossible to scale up to the thousands or millions of qubits scientists believe will eventually be needed.

What is new

Last year, imec and Diraq scientists showed they could make one or two silicon qubits this way that worked well enough for practical use. The new result proves they can scale that up to eight qubits without losing quality — the qubits still hold on to their fragile quantum information (a property called "coherence") long enough to be useful, even as more of them are connected.

Just as importantly, the team found that adding more qubits didn't require a huge jump in supporting hardware — like the wiring and sensors needed to control and read the qubits. In many quantum computing designs, this kind of support infrastructure becomes the real bottleneck, ballooning out of control as systems grow. Showing that it doesn't have to work that way here is a promising sign.

A key step towards quantum computers

Eight qubits alone won't solve any world-changing problems. But the significance lies in how they were made. If quantum chips can eventually be produced on the same industrial assembly lines that already mass-produce ordinary computer chips — instead of being built one by one in a specialized lab — that would make it dramatically more feasible to manufacture the large, reliable quantum computers scientists have been chasing for decades.

In other words, this isn't a finished quantum computer. It's evidence that there's a real, practical path to building one — using tools the semiconductor industry already knows how to use at massive scale.