Quobly, a French quantum computing startup, this week announced a collaboration with STMicroelectronics, a Franco-Italian global semiconductor company, to produce quantum processor units at scale.
Based in Grenoble, Quobly’s technology is based on 15 years of collaborative research between internationally recognized Research and Technology Organizations, CEA Leti and CNRS. By leveraging STMicroelectronics’ advanced FD-SOI semiconductor process technologies, a technology it has developed and exploited commercially for years across automotive, industrial and consumer applications, Quobly said the collaboration is poised to make large-scale quantum computing feasible and cost-effective, positioning both companies at the forefront of next-generation computing technologies.
Quantum technology taps into the unusual behavior of atomic and sub-atomic particles to perform far more complex calculations than today’s computers. The hope is that this could lead to breakthroughs in drug discovery and previously unsolvable problems as well as solutions that have the potential to generate higher returns for business.
In its December 11 announcement Quobly, which launched as a company in 2022, said it aims to break the 1-million-qubit barrier by 2031, targeting applications ranging from pharmaceuticals, finance, materials science and complex systems modeling, including climate and fluid dynamics simulations, says founder and CEO Maud Vinet. Together, Quobly and ST aim to drive down R&D costs and address the market’s demand for scalable, affordable quantum computing processors.
“The quantum community needs to be able to produce at scale and right now there is not a realistic cost-effective path,” Vinet said in an interview with The Innovator. “Our work with ST is this path.” She explained:“In different wafer cycles we have proved we can control the qubits and now we are able to leverage the silicon industry to put all the ingredients together on one chip in a commercially viable way.”
The semiconductor industry has played a pivotal role in enabling classical computers to scale at cost; Quobly says it has the same transformative potential for quantum computers, making them commercially scalable and cost competitive. Silicon spin qubits are excellent for achieving fault-tolerant, large-scale quantum computing, registering clock speeds in the µsec range, fidelity above 99% for one and two-qubit gate operations and incomparably small unit cell sizes (in the hundredths of 100nm²), according to the French company.
To capitalize on decades of semiconductor infrastructure investments, Quobly has adopted a fabless model. It focuses on FD-SOI, a commercially available CMOS technology manufactured by global leaders like STMicroelectronics, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung, as a platform for quantum computing
Earlier this week, on December 9, Quobly said it has proved that FD-SOI technology can serve as a scalable platform for commercial quantum computing, leveraging traditional semiconductor manufacturing fabs and French research facility CEA-Leti’s R&D pilot line.
With CEA-Leti, CEA-IRIG and CNRS, Quobly said in a December 9 announcement that it has demonstrated the key building blocks for a quantum computer leveraging commercial FD-SOI:
- Low-temperature operations and characterization of their digital and analog performances, adhering to circuit design guidelines.
- Single qubit operations using hole and electron spin qubits using the CEA-Leti’s R&D pilot line. This ambipolar platform optimizes system performance, leveraging electrons’ long coherence times for memory, as well as the holes’ strong spin-orbit interaction for fast data processing
- Charge control in commercial GF 22FDX to further define a standard cell for a two-qubit gate
In the future, to be successful, quantum computers will need to work on size, weight, power, and cost, according to Yole Group’s 2024 Semiconductor Report. The report says semiconductor qubits have a big advantage in scalability by leveraging CMOS wafer-scale manufacturing, which is what Quobly is doing with ST.
Some quantum startups are already working with other Tier-1 chip providers, like GlobalFoundries, a multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company incorporated in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Malta. These startups benefit from grouped services , meaning that all startups working with them (including Quobly, for the past 2 years) have equal access to a shared foundation for processing devices, says Andrea Busch, Quobly’s Chief of Staff.
Quobly says its partnership with ST is different because ST does not work with any other company, and so it is the exclusive beneficiaries of the developments emanating from the partnership. ST is also doing more tailoring to Quobly’s processes, which is counter to GF’s ethos of making a generic off-the-shelf foundation that is revenue-generating for them in the short term, Busch says.
To solve the problem of fab access several quantum startups haev announced ambitious and costly plans to build their own fabs or to forge excusive relationships with fabs with the goal of designing entirely new processing lines, from ground up, dedicated uniquely to quantum processing. “This is contrary to our vision, as we are using a traditional fab process line and respecting strict fab guidelines – only asking for slight modifications (about 8% of the entire process) so that no new facilities are needed to accommodate our production cycle,” says Busch.“This makes our strategy much more cost-efficient, agile and sets us apart from our competitors in terms of the exclusivity of our advances and the rapidity of our commercial rollout and wafer production cycle times.”
In the first phase of the collaboration, Quobly and ST will adapt ST’s 28nm FD-SOI process to match Quobly’s requirements, targeting a 100 Qubit Quantum Machine with proof of scalability beyond 100k physical qubits. ST will leverage its integrated device manufacturer model to bring Quobly its ability to bridge co-design, prototyping, industrialization and volume production at scale in 300mm fabs using FD-SOI technology.
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