For the past six years, Intel has been working on building a full-stack commercial quantum system based on the silicon spin qubits using its expertise in silicon transistor design, high-volume manufacturing, and fabrication technologies, Director of Quantum Hardware James Clarke touted in a recent blog post.

As more tech companies dive into the quantum computing market, Intel is taking a unique approach that uses the same process line from its leading-edge logic technology to make the qubits.

“Since Intel is dedicated to transistor and microcircuit design, the company has technology like computer-aided design for device creation. That same capability doesn't yet exist for quantum, but we’re developing it,” Clarke wrote. “If we build silicon spin qubits on silicon wafers and develop a qubit technology that looks like a transistor, we can follow Moore's Law of acceleration to build a large-scale system.”

On that end, Intel announced a major step toward fabricating quantum chips on its transistor manufacturing processes in October. “The mass production of qubits on 300-millimeter silicon wafers using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography in a high-volume factory allows us to fit 10,000 small arrays of quantum dots on a single wafer,” Clarke noted.

Earlier this year, Intel also introduced its quantum software development kit that allows developers to interface with the company’s quantum computing stack and programs quantum algorithms in simulators and on quantum hardware in the future, he added.

Clarke argues the industry is 10 to 15 years away from building a fault-tolerant, 1 million-plus qubit machine and true commercial quantum computers. Quantum vendors recently had made some technological progress, such as IBM’s 433-qubit processor.

Similar to many technology vendors’ vision, Intel expects a hybrid future for quantum along with classical supercomputing.

“Right now, we're limited to working with a relatively small number of qubits that we can either simulate or run so that quantum algorithms can be co-optimized between classical components and quantum components,” Clarke wrote. “A very large-scale quantum computer will probably have a small supercomputer next to it. And the bill of materials for a quantum computer may have more from the classical computing space than from the actual quantum chip.”