University of Sheffield a Partner in World’s First Quantum Devices Foundry

(HPC.Wire) The University of Sheffield is part of a new consortium of academic and industrial partners that will bring quantum devices to 21st century applications. By delivering a national open-access quantum device foundry in the UK, the project will enable accelerated development of technologies for quantum communications, computing, imaging and sensing applications.
Several ground-breaking applications have emerged in the past decade, but market adoption of quantum systems has been held back by the lack of widely available quantum photonic components, referred to as QPCs.
QFoundry is a £5.7 million programme that is part-funded by the UK Quantum Technologies Challenge, led by UK Research and Innovation. The project will utilise standard semiconductor techniques to upscale the manufacture of QPCs that are critical to quantum systems.
The University of Sheffield’s activity in QFoundry is led by Professor Jon Heffernan, Director of the National Epitaxy Facility in the University’s Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. This national facility is already providing semiconductor wafers to UK researchers in over 22 leading universities and is pioneering the development of semiconductor quantum devices.
The facility is now part of the Sheffield Quantum Centre at the University which was officially opened at the beginning of 2020 and brings together more than 70 of the University’s leading scientists and engineers from the Departments of Physics and Astronomy, Electronic and Electrical Engineering and the Department of Computer Science to develop new quantum technologies.