World’s first semiconductor made by quantum tech stuns chip industry

Researchers at Australia’s Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) have unveiled the world’s first semiconductor fabricated using quantum machine learning (QML) techniques, marking a significant breakthrough in semiconductor design. Their approach, centered on a Quantum Kernel-Aligned Regressor (QKAR), outperformed seven classical machine learning (CML) algorithms traditionally used in this field. The team focused on modeling the Ohmic contact resistance—a critical yet challenging parameter that measures electrical resistance at the metal-semiconductor interface—using data from 159 experimental samples of gallium nitride high electron mobility transistors (GaN HEMTs), which offer superior performance compared to silicon-based semiconductors. The QKAR architecture converts classical data into quantum data using five qubits, enabling efficient feature extraction through a quantum kernel alignment layer. This quantum-processed information is then analyzed by classical algorithms to identify key fabrication parameters and optimize the semiconductor manufacturing process. By intelligently reducing the problem’s dimensionality, the researchers ensured compatibility