Tiptek Received Phase I SBIR Funding from DOE’S Advanced Material & Manufacturing Technologies Office

July 19, 2024 – Tiptek received Phase I SBIR funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Material & Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO). This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project aims to meet a critical national need by developing improved methods to fabricate quantum computers, as part of the EES2 goal of increasing microelectronics energy efficiency one-thousand-fold in the next 20 years.

The potential commercial applications of quantum computers lie in several technology sectors, including cybersecurity, materials and pharmaceuticals, banking and finance, and advanced manufacturing. In particular, three principal applications of quantum computing are especially promising: Improved encryption and de-encryption methods, faster and more accurate methods to discover advanced materials and drugs, and faster solutions of large-scale combinatorics problems such as scheduling, planning, or logistics to make businesses more efficient or detecting deepfakes.

The goal of this work is to solve a major problem in qubit device fabrication: How to place phosphorus dopants in silicon with atomic precision and then prevent them from subsequently moving. Tiptek’s approach to achieve the perfect qubit addresses the dopant diffusion process through two innovations: Tiptek will develop (1) a new and much improved nanoprobe, which will enable and significantly enhance the ability to position dopants precisely in silicon, and (2) a new process to carry out the silicon encapsulation step that prevents dopant atom movement.

This collaborative project will combine experts from Tiptek, LLC (the sole US manufacturer of nanoprobes), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (home of Prof. Joe Lyding, the inventor of HDL and co-PI on this project), and Sandia National Laboratories (a world leader in quantum computing).

To learn more about the AMMTO SBIR projects, read DOE's press release here: https://www.energy.gov/eere/ammto/articles/small-businesses-receive-ammto-funding-advance-innovative-manufacturing-and