Intel's Release of ‘Tunnel Falls,’ 12-Qubit Silicon Chip

Quantum PR bursts us with an IBM and Intel moment.

Hello Everyone,

I will be posting a fair bit less during the summer months. I’ll be covering IMB’s announcements when the dust settles a bit more on their Nature piece and the PR. But I wanted to go over some of what Intel has been saying around its own quantum efforts.

While Intel has slipped behind Nvidia, AMD, TSMC and a host of other semiconductor leaders, it’s still splurging on big plans, promises and U.S. subsidies. Recently Intel announced that it will spend $25 billion on a new factory in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, calling it the largest-ever international investment in the country.

In mid June, 2023 something else happend with Intel that some consider important in the future of the hybrid Quantum cloud. Intel released its quantum research spin qubit chip for researchers to directly control the hardware and acquire more practical knowledge about the quantum chip as Intel pursues quantum computing. Nice images Intel! Jack as always amuses me in his reactions to these PR announcements.

Tunnel Falls?

Intel said in a press release that it would send its quantum research chip, Tunnel Falls, to the quantum research community. Intel will collaborate with Qubit Collaboratory to provide Tunnel Falls to research laboratories, democratizing silicon spin qubits to gain hands-on experience working with scaled arrays of these qubits.

“Tunnel Falls is Intel's most advanced silicon spin qubit chip to date and draws upon the company's decades of transistor design and manufacturing expertise,” said James Clarke, director of Quantum Hardware, Intel.

I guess for me Intel has about as much authority/credibility as IBM when it comes to the realization of patents and actual future of entire technological paradigms. As with Generative A.I., there’s a lot of quantum computing PR that you have to disect with a grain of salt. As loud as IBM’s PR was this week in June, 2023, the real utility of some of these findings and research is to me not just nascent but sometimes a bit far-fetched. To the point where, topological breakthroughs make more sense to me.

In September 2022, Intel released the beta version of the Intel® Quantum Software Development Kit (SDK). When it is released this year, Intel’s quantum spin qubit chip and Intel’s Horse Ridge II control chip will be interoperable with the SDK’s full quantum computer in simulation.

So how about those silicon spin qubit chips?

Image: Tunnel Falls chip on a finger. Silicon spin qubits are up to 1 million times smaller than other qubit types. The Tunnel Falls chip measures approximately 50nm x 50nm, potentially allowing for faster scaling.