Imec And Xanadu SiN

Imec and photonics specialist Xanadu have  announced a partnership to develop photonic qubits based on SiN waveguides.

Xanadu is developing a quantum computer  based on photonics.

“Xanadu’s ultimate mission is to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere,” says Xanadu founder and CEO Christian Weedbrook, “to do this we have the ambitious goal of reaching one million qubits using photonics.”

Specifically, these photonic qubits are based on squeezed states – a type of light generated by chip-integrated silicon photonic devices.

Xanadu’s photonic approach offers the benefits of scalability to one million qubits via optical networking, room temperature computation and the ability to leverage Imec’s fab.

The Imec SiN photonics process was originally developed for communications. Xanadu sees Imec’s capability to deliver up to a thousand wafers a year as critical to their scaling up of  its technology.

Other approaches to photonic quantum computing usually rely on single photon sources made from silicon waveguides, which suffer from non-deterministic operation.

Using SiN enables the generation of squeezed states, which replace single photons as the basic resource for synthesizing qubits. Squeezed states are deterministically generated, and can be used to distill error-resistant qubits called ‘GKP states’.

When multiplexed and implemented in Xanadu’s architecture, these offer a more promising path to fault-tolerant quantum computing..

Xanadu offers cloud access to both photonic quantum hardware and software solutions over its Xanadu Cloud platform.

It recently announced a $100 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners giving a total of $145 million raised thus far.