In this talk I will give an overview of the development of silicon-based quantum computing (QC), from the basic science through to its prospects for industrial-scale commercialization based on CMOS manufacturing. I begin with Kane’s original proposal [1] for a silicon quantum computer, conceived at UNSW in 1998, based on single donor atoms in silicon, and will review the first demonstrations of such qubits, using both electron spins [2,3] and nuclear spins [4]. I then discuss the development of SiMOS quantum dot qubits, including the demonstration of single-electron occupancy [5], high-fidelity single-qubit gates [6], and the first demonstration of a two-qubit logic gate in silicon [7], together with assessments of silicon qubit fidelities [9,10]. I will also explore the technical issues related to scaling a silicon-CMOS based quantum processor [8] up to the millions of qubits that will be required for fault-tolerant QC, including the demonstrations of silicon qubit operation above one kelvin [11] and the use of global microwave fields capable of controlling millions of qubits [12].

References

[1] B. E. Kane, Nature 393, 133 (1998).

[2] A. Morello et al., Nature 467, 687 (2010).

[3] J.J. Pla et al., Nature 489, 541 (2012).

[4] J.J. Pla et al., Nature 496, 334 (2013).

[5] C.H. Yang et al., Nature Communications 4, 2069 (2013).

[6] M. Veldhorst et al., Nature Nanotechnology 9, 981 (2014).

[7] M. Veldhorst et al., Nature 526, 410 (2015).

[8] M. Veldhorst et al., Nature Communications 8, 1766 (2017).

[9] H. Yang et al., Nature Electronics 2, 151 (2019).

[10] W. Huang et al., Nature 569, 532 (2019).

[11] H. Yang et al., Nature 580, 350 (2020).

[12] E. Vahapoglu et al., Science Advances 7, eabg9158 (2021).