Irish startup Equal1 receives $60M to start deploying its scalable quantum computing tech – News

Irish quantum computing startup Equal1 Ltd. said today it has raised $60 million in a new funding round led by the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund.

The Dublin-based startup, which began life as a spinout from University College Dublin, is the creator of Ireland’s first-ever domestic quantum processing unit or QPU, which is known as Bell-1. It launched Bell-1 last year in an effort to make the long sought-after goal of functional quantum computers a reality.

For years, the promise of quantum computing has been held back by the incredible complexity of these machines. Though companies such as Google LLC and IBM Corp. have made some fascinating developments, their quantum machines require specialized fabrication and use exotic cooling methods that necessitate having dozens of physicists on hand to maintain them.

Equal1 takes a different approach, and has built its QPU using many of the same manufacturing methods developed for classical computers. Its QPU Bell-1 is the first in the industry that’s built on regular silicon, which means it can be integrated into existing data center server racks and deployed alongside classical computers.

To be more specific, Equal1 has developed a “silicon spin” computer that uses existing semiconductor technologies, including the cryogenic coolers developed for MRI machines and the wafers and process nodes of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The advantage of doing this is that its QPUs are much more scalable and comparatively cheaper than other quantum technologies.

Silicon spin-based quantum computers use quantum properties of electrons trapped in tiny semiconductor structures called quantum dots to serve as their qubits. Because they’re housed in traditional silicon, they can leverage the mature semiconductor infrastructure to enable greater scalability and support mass production.

With silicon spin qubits, the spin of the individual electrons, which can be either up or down, represents the quantum state, which is either a zero or a one. For control, the electric fields of nearby gates are used to manipulate the electron’s spin to perform quantum operations, with microwave pulses helping to flip the spins when required.

The approach is interesting because of the stability of these qubits, which leads to longer coherence times and higher fidelity, meaning silicon spin-based computers can potentially scale to many thousands of qubits. In particular, its compatibility with existing silicon fabrication technology paves the way for potentially millions of qubits to be integrated on a single chip to reach the required scale necessary to achieve “quantum advantage,” which is the point at which quantum computers become more powerful than classical devices.

The round also saw participation from Atlantic Bridge, Matterwave Ventures, Enterprise Ireland, Elkstone, TNO Ventures and the European Innovation Council Fund, the company said.

The funds from today’s round will enable Equal1 to start deploying Bell-1 in various High Performance Computing centers across Europe, including the European Space Agency’s Phi-Lab in Italy. The startup also plans to accelerate its roadmap towards “millions” of on-chip qubits.

Equal1 Chief Executive Jason Lynch said the round is a key milestone that will see the company transition from development to real-world deployment of its quantum devices. “As AI pushes classical computing into power and cost limits, quantum is the way forward, but only if it can be manufactured and deployed like the rest of the stack,” he stressed. “By building quantum processors on standard silicon, we’re turning quantum from bespoke hardware into deployable infrastructure.”

Image: Equal1