First Electronic-Photonic Quantum Chip Created In Commercial Foundry

It's "a milestone for scalable quantum technologies," according to the announcement from Boston University. Scientists from Boston University, UC Berkeley, and Northwestern University "reported the world's first electronic-photonic-quantum system on a chip, according to a study published in Nature Electronics."

Quantum computing is on "a decades-long path from concept to reality," says Milos PopoviÄ, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at BU and a senior author on the study. "This is a small step on that path — but an important one, because it shows we can build repeatable, controllable quantum systems in commercial semiconductor foundries." The system combines quantum light sources and stabilizing electronics using a standard 45-nanometer semiconductor manufacturing process to produce reliable streams of correlated photon pairs (particles of light) — a key resource for emerging quantum technologies. The advance paves the way for mass-producible "quantum light factory" chips and large-scale quantum systems built from many such chips working together...

Just as electronic chips are powered by electric currents, and optical communication links by laser light, future quantum technologies will require a steady stream of quantum light resource units to perform their functions. To provide this, the researchers' work created an array of "quantum light factories" on a silicon chip, each less than a millimeter by a millimeter in dimension... "What excites me most is that we embedded the control directly on-chip — stabilizing a quantum process in real time," says Anirudh Ramesh, a PhD student at Northwestern who led the quantum measurements. "That's a critical step toward scalable quantum systems."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the news.

This could integrate well.

[LinuxGeek]

Imagine some qubits integrated on some high end GPU. Even just having a chip on the same board as the GPU could make for some very useful hardware.

Re:

[Tablizer]

Marketers are used to that shit.

Misleading headline

[quax]

Psi Quantum has been integrating photonics and electronics on the same chip for quite some time.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]

In fact this paper is referenced in the publication that this article is based on.

The novelty here is not really spelled out in the bu.edu article nor the paper's abstract, but in the intro paragraph of the paper:

To function properly, however, silicon quantum photonic devices, especially micro-resonator based ones like photon-pair sources and filters, require continuous monitoring and control by electronic circuits. To date this has been carried out using bulky off-chip electronics [22], limiting the practically achievable system size and complexity. Realizing the full potential of silicon photonics as a platform for quantum information processing still requires this classical control bottleneck to be resolved.

The paper can be read for free at:
https://arxiv.org/html/2411.05... [arxiv.org]