Two months after its launch, GlobalFoundries’ Quantum Technology Solutions business unit is sizing up the challenge ahead: transfer its semiconductor manufacturing experience into a new, multimodal form of computing, cultivate customers and, along the way, help industrialize the emerging quantum sector.
Quantum Technology Solutions debuted on May 21 as the U.S. Department of Commerce announced its intent to invest $375 million to support GlobalFoundries’ quantum venture. The funding is part of the federal government’s $2 billion bid to ramp up the domestic quantum computing industry and boost manufacturing capacity.
A key goal is scaling quantum computing systems to the point where they can address high-value use cases in business and government. Getting there involves moving beyond experimental deployments with relatively low numbers of qubits — the fundamental information units of quantum computing — to "something that looks a lot more like millions of qubits," said Nicholas Sergeant, vice president and head of Quantum Technology Solutions at GlobalFoundries.
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"That requires much more reliable, consistent manufacturing processes that are available in larger-scale semiconductor fabs, where many of these technologies will eventually reside," he said.
GlobalFoundries, which spun out of AMD in 2009, has a head start with established manufacturing processes and technologies. The task the company and other suppliers face is learning how to apply their semiconductor know-how to quantum mass manufacturing.
"We believe that our underlying technologies are a good starting point, but it might require some sort of fine-tuning," Sergeant said.
Moving toward utility-scale quantum systems
While suppliers like GlobalFoundries gear up for industrial production, downstream users in financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals are already experimenting with quantum technology. What’s expected to happen next is a transition from laboratory-like work to practical applications and real-world problem-solving.
A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) article published in June stated that "quantum’s commercial inflection point — where the technology starts creating commercial value for end users — can arrive by 2030."
Quantum hardware’s current trajectory is "on track to reach commercially useful scale" by then, BCG noted.
"I do think we are entering the era of scaling systems," said Matt Langione, managing director and partner at BCG and lead author of the article.
Crossing the error correction threshold
Error correction is the key development that put the industry on the path to scale, according to Langione. Technology suppliers must deal with the inherently fragile nature of quantum states to make their platforms computationally viable. Here, the critical concept is the quantum error correction threshold. When error correction performs below the threshold, the error rate decreases as the size of the system increases. Above the threshold, the error rate increases and overwhelms the computation.
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"Pretty much, this is the test," Langione said of the error threshold. "This is the baseline entry point for commercial, industrial quantum computing. Because that means you can scale qubits, whether it’s scale out or scale up."
Demonstrations of below-threshold performance prompted government and industry to think about the scaling phase of quantum computing, Langione said. That set the stage for increased funding.
"That’s where you have seen all of the investment, including the $2 billion from the government, around scaling."
Why off-the-shelf ASICs can’t handle millions of qubits
The investments will play out differently among the recipients. GlobalFoundries, for its part, is focusing on building platforms spanning multiple quantum modalities, including superconducting, trapped-ion, photonic, topological and silicon-spin qubits. Building a platform involves identifying a common capability that cuts across the various approaches.
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Sergeant pointed to one shared requirement: controlling signals as they move into and out of a quantum system. Classical electronic devices send pulses to manipulate qubits in the quantum processing unit (QPU). Other signals capture information from the qubits, which is then read out to a classical computer for processing.
The control issue becomes more challenging as quantum systems scale. With the larger systems, "the number of inputs and outputs are scaling, requiring new engineering solutions to route and process all these signals," Sergeant said.
In addition, some modalities, such as superconducting and silicon spin, require extreme cooling. Signals move through multiple temperature planes, beginning at room temperature and — in the case of superconducting qubits — eventually ending up at near absolute zero. Maintaining temperatures at that end of the scale is called cryogenic cooling.
Quantum systems use application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to control and manage the signals, but Sergeant noted that ASICs will need to be optimized for the next technology generation. Using an off-the-shelf ASIC, or an off-the-shelf process design kit to create an ASIC, will result in a chip that’s suboptimal in terms of attributes like area — the physical space it occupies — and heat dissipation, he said. Also, the performance predicted for an ASIC designed to operate at room temperature might not pan out in a super-cooled environment.
In this context, GlobalFoundries will primarily provide quantum-optimized process design kits, but the company offers design services to help accelerate customers’ ASIC programs, Sergeant said.
The company plans to adapt its process design kits so customers creating an ASIC will be able to predict how it will perform at low temperatures, Sergeant noted.
Optimized ASICs might not matter that much for the current generation of quantum systems — demonstrations of 100 or a couple of hundred qubits, he said. But that will change as quantum systems grow.
"If you are going to build millions of qubits and each of them needs to be tightly controlled, manipulated and read out, you can no longer afford not having an optimized control ASIC looking at this problem," he said.
Transferring HPC techniques to quantum chips
In the classical high-performance computing world, system-builders put together lots of heterogeneous ASICs into a single package to scale their computing capabilities, Sergeant said.
"This is exactly what we are trying to do in the quantum world," he noted. "As we scale the capability, can we put multiple quantum computers on a fab? Can you put multiples of these smaller units together into one single package, tightly controlled and integrated, so that it builds a larger system?"
Using 3D advanced packaging to bridge the cryogenic gap
Sergeant said the answer lies in advanced packaging, another common building block for manufacturing quantum components at industrial scale.
Advanced packaging techniques such as 3D heterogeneous integration involve stacking smaller chips, referred to as dies, tiles or chiplets, to form a larger system, he said. This approach could also be used to bring a cryogenic control ASIC ‘closer’ to the quantum computing chip, bonded together in a single package, he added.
The issue ahead is bringing techniques that work in the HPC sector to quantum modalities that require cryogenic cooling. He cited the reliability and testing of QPUs at cryogenic temperatures as a challenge, and one that requires specialized setups and infrastructure investment.
"You have to think about new areas," Sergeant said.
The 3- to 5-year timeline for enterprise tech leaders
Sergeant described GlobalFoundries’ quantum effort as a three- to five-year program.
"It will take a few years to have a fully qualified capability out in the market," he noted.
However, the company will move toward an early-access model for customers, given the fast pace of quantum technology, Sergeant added. At launch, GlobalFoundries cited several quantum computer makers as customers, including Diraq, Equal1, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum and Quantum Motion.
"Our primary focus right now is continuing to build on existing partnerships with our customers, but at the same time expanding partnerships to new customers," Sergeant said.
In both cases, GlobalFoundries will partner with customers to ensure its upcoming quantum capabilities are aligned with their requirements, he noted.
Discussions surrounding control ASICs or advanced packaging might seem remote to the eventual users of quantum computing. But the ongoing work could affect CIOs and CTOs by the end of the decade. That is, if the technology remains on its current track.
Technology leaders, especially those in R&D-heavy industries, could be among the first to adopt at-scale quantum systems in fields such as materials research, chemistry and drug development.
"It’s still early days from an application area perspective," Sergeant said. "But the belief is that the capabilities that are going to be developed in the next few years will become increasingly relevant to those areas."
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