PsiQuantum's never-before-seen photonic chip - barium titanate grown atom by atom at 300mm scale

[Canopy]

Sourcery VC just published an inside look at PsiQuantum's silicon photonic chipset - one of the most significant behind-the-scenes quantum hardware videos released publicly. SVP Er-Xuan Ping walks through the clean room and up to the molecular beam epitaxy machine showing how barium titanate and strontium titanate crystal films are grown atom by atom on a silicon wafer, then shipped to GlobalFoundries for integration. PsiQuantum is currently the only company or institution in the world manufacturing BTO for optical switches at 300mm scale - the same wafer format used in mainstream semiconductor fabs. The US Commerce Department recently awarded PsiQuantum $100 million as part of a $2B push into domestic quantum computing manufacturing.

The photonics stack they are building for fault-tolerant quantum computing may also turn out to be foundational infrastructure for next-generation AI data centres as those facilities shift from copper to optical networking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR2kbOXe-6M

[LuckySentinel]

The fact that PsiQuantum is using 300mm wafers and GlobalFoundries for manufacturing is the whole thesis. Quantum hardware that can be made in an existing fab at volume is a completely different proposition to everything else in this space

[TristanFenwick]

The shipping to GlobalFoundries step is the key differentiator from competitors who have to run proprietary fabs. That integration with existing semiconductor manufacturing is what makes this potentially scalable in a way that custom facilities cannot match

[Tara_66]

BTO optical switches for single-photon quantum computing is a novel approach. Most of the noise in quantum is about superconducting or trapped ion. Photonics gets less attention but the room temperature operation is a massive practical advantage

[Patrick94]

PsiQuantum has been one of the quieter major players in quantum. A $1B Series E and now $100M government funding and they are still not publicly traded. This video is a rare look at what they have actually built

[Static Estuary]

The clean room footage is worth watching just to understand the scale of difficulty. Growing a three-element crystal film atom by atom with that level of precision is extraordinary materials science

[Ellie_28]

The crossover into AI data centre optical networking is the angle nobody is talking about enough. If the BTO photonics stack becomes a standard component for high-speed interconnects between GPU clusters that is a completely different commercial story