Arkeon is a new company in the Chalmers Ventures portfolio. The company has developed a method to fine-tune the frequency of qubits on quantum chips after production. This innovation addresses two of the biggest challenges in industrial quantum computer manufacturing: scaling up the number of qubits per chip and avoiding the scrapping of chips that would otherwise be unusable.

The future market for quantum computer chips is expected to be enormous. However, no large-scale production of quantum chips exists today. One major obstacle is the issue of frequency collisions and crosstalk. Simply put, it’s like tuning a string instrument: each qubit on the chip corresponds to a string that must hit its exact note. With a six-string guitar, this is manageable, but when the number of qubits grows into the hundreds or thousands, it’s more like tuning an instrument with hundreds of thousands of strings, one wrong note ruins the entire chord. Without a way to fine-tune after production, entire chips risk being wasted.

-The problem today is that there are major manufacturing uncertainties when setting the qubit frequency. When you have multiple qubits, their frequencies start to overlap. In simple terms, it becomes a frequency collision. If the qubits are too close in frequency, they interfere with each other and nothing works, says Peter Hörstedt, CEO of Arkeon.

Chalmers Ventures has a growing number of startups emerging from quantum computing research. In Arkeon, Chalmers Ventures sees a technology with significant growth potential.

-Arkeon’s technology is a platform technology that improves production precision in superconducting quantum computers and fundamentally increases their scalability and usability. It solves the performance loss problem that all quantum computer developers are currently struggling with, says David Storek, Venture Creation Manager and Pre-seed Investment Director at Chalmers Ventures.

-As an investor at Chalmers Ventures, I believe we’ve been fortunate to be part of such a fundamental technological advancement and will continue to support the company in every way moving forward.

What Arkeon does can be likened to giving the quantum chip its tuning pegs after the guitar has been built. With their method—trimming—each “string” (qubit) can be adjusted until it hits the right note. Previous solutions tried to tune the strings before the instrument was fully built, often resulting in inefficiency and a poorly tuned instrument. By trimming afterward, the entire instrument—the chip—can be brought into harmony, with cleaner chords and significantly higher precision.

The method involves sending electrical pulses through the strings (the qubits’ Josephson junctions). These pulses manipulate the resistance of the strings, which correlates to their frequency.

-When you produce a quantum chip today with ten qubits, you get a frequency precision of only five to ten percent. That makes the chip unusable. Today, chips are discarded and new ones made. So we solve both the scalability problem and the yield problem, says Peter Hörstedt.

Currently, Arkeon operates with a mail-order business model. Labs send in non-functioning chips, Arkeon adjusts the frequencies, and sends them back. In the future, Peter Hörstedt envisions Arkeon’s method being integrated into factory chip production.

-The industry aims to reach millions of qubits in the 2030s. That will be impossible with today’s problems. Scaling won’t be feasible. We want to help enable industrial manufacturing by being the final step in the value chain before the chip is packaged and delivered, says Peter Hörstedt.

In the near future, Arkeon needs to validate the technology. The company has demonstrated that the method works at Chalmers. The foundation of the company is research conducted within the national quantum computer project at the Wallenberg Center for Quantum Technology (WACQT), coordinated from Chalmers.

-We are now validating that our technology works on other types of qubit architectures, says Peter Hörstedt.

The next step is a commercial project with a chip manufacturer.

The Team

• Peter Hörstedt, CEO
• PhD Andreas Nylander CTO, Senior Research Engineer, Quantum Technology, Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Chalmers University of Technology. Co-founder and researcher at WACQT-projektet (Wallenberg Centre for Quantum Technology)
• Phd Marcus Rommel Scentific Advisor, Senior Research Engineer, Quantum Technology, Microtechnology and Nanoscience, Chalmers University of Technology.

Contact

• David Storek, Chalmers Ventures, +46 (0) 709 43 87 87
• Peter Hörstedt, CEO, Arkeon + 46 (0)722 18 28 20