Diraq scales foundry-made silicon qubits to eight

Diraq said July 9, 2026, that it has demonstrated an eight-qubit silicon array fabricated on imec’s 300 mm CMOS line, a step the company says strengthens its path to utility-scale quantum computing. The Nature Communications paper shows the same industrial process used in earlier two-qubit work can scale without sacrificing coherence or control.

Why it matters: - Diraq’s latest result suggests silicon spin qubits can scale using standard semiconductor manufacturing instead of custom quantum fabrication. - The company says that could lower the technical and economic barriers to building commercially useful quantum computers. - The work also points to a route for keeping chips compact as qubit counts rise, which matters for deployment in data centers.

What happened: - Diraq announced the publication of "Eight-Qubit Operation of a 300 mm SiMOS Foundry-Fabricated Device" in Nature Communications on July 9, 2026. - The device was fabricated by imec using a 300 mm CMOS process. - The qubits were operated as a linear array of eight, expanding the earlier two-qubit unit cell by a factor of four. - Andrew Dzurak, Diraq founder and CEO, said the result shows an industrial path to quantum computing with no compromise in coherence.

The details: - All eight qubits were successfully tuned and individually addressed. - Single-qubit coherence times stayed comparable to, and at the upper end of, the state of the art for the platform. - Ramsey dephasing times reached about 40 microseconds. - Hahn-echo coherence times reached about 1.3 milliseconds. - The readout architecture scaled without a significant increase in sensor count, wiring density, or thermal load. - A cascaded charge-sensing scheme enabled high-fidelity readout of central qubits using sensors at the ends of the array. - Controlled two-qubit exchange operations between adjacent qubits showed coherent inter-qubit coupling in the larger array. - Diraq says the same control techniques used at smaller scale worked at the larger array size. - Diraq says the larger array was built on the same wafer technology in under a year. - Diraq says its utility-scale quantum computer would not require a larger physical footprint than the infrastructure needed for the eight-qubit device. - Diraq’s earlier two-qubit devices, reported in September 2025, exceeded 99% fidelity in operations.

Between the lines: - The result matters because scaling is one of quantum computing’s hardest problems, and many platforms need new hardware generations as they grow. - Diraq is trying to argue that silicon qubits can follow the same manufacturing playbook that made classical chips scalable. - The company’s claims about millions of qubits on a chip and utility-scale systems by 2029 are forward-looking goals, not demonstrated outcomes.

What's next: - Diraq is working toward devices with hundreds of qubits. - The company’s stated roadmap targets thousands of qubits by 2029 and more than one million by 2031. - Diraq says it expects CMOS-native quantum chips to scale toward million-qubit devices while using existing semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure.

The bottom line: - Diraq’s eight-qubit result is a meaningful scale-up for silicon quantum hardware, and the key signal is that the company says it preserved coherence while staying within standard foundry manufacturing.