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Australian Financial Review
Feb 20, 2024
Start-up says it will beat famous Aussie rival to make a quantum computer


A start-up born of the same physics school that produced the government-backed Silicon Quantum Computing says it is now “100 per cent confident” it will beat its more famous sibling to the punch and produce Australia’s first commercial quantum computer by 2028.

The start-up, Diraq, just closed a $US15 million ($23 million) fundraise and on Tuesday it opened a new laboratory, which it will use to get its technology ready for commercial deployment in the next four years, said Diraq founder and chief executive Professor Andrew Dzurak.

Like Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) – the high-profile start-up run by former Australian of the Year Professor Michelle Simmons and backed by Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank and the federal government – Diraq arose out of decades of quantum computing research at the University of NSW.

And like SQC, Diraq is trying to design a quantum computer that can be built as a silicon chip: an approach that has proved slow to bear fruit compared with competing technologies being pursued by the likes of Google and IBM. But both Diraq and SQC hope it will ultimately scale further, faster, using well-understood fabrication methods similar to those used for the production of PCs and mobile phones.

However, unlike SQC, Diraq seems to be making rapid progress towards its goals.

Whereas SQC appears to have missed several of its milestones and now does not expect to have a basic but nevertheless commercially useful quantum computer until 2033, Professor Dzurak told The Australian Financial Review Diraq was well on schedule and might even beat its self-imposed June 30, 2028, deadline for creating a basic-yet-commercially valuable machine.

Quantum computers are designed to harness the strange properties of matter at the atomic scale to make calculations in seconds, minutes or hours that would take regular computers years, decades or even centuries to run, if they could perform them at all.

It is expected that quantum computers will ultimately need many millions or even billions of “quantum bits”, or “qubits”, before they’ll be able to run every type of quantum computing algorithm, making them what are known as “universal” quantum computers analogous to today’s all-purpose supercomputers.

But in the meantime, simpler quantum computers with only hundreds or thousands of qubits, capable of running only a few algorithms, can still be commercially valuable in more science-related industries, Professor Dzurak said. It is such a device that Diraq is hoping to build by 2028, to meet its “Phase 2” milestone.

“I’m 100 per cent confident that we will have a quantum computing system by 2028, that will be commercially valuable,” he said.

While SQC’s qubits are built by precisely placing phosphorous atoms in a lattice of silicon and using their quantum properties to make computations, Diraq’s qubits are created using transistors similar to the ones already found in conventional computers, Professor Dzurak said.

That means Diraq’s quantum chips can be built much more simply, using the same factories (or “fabs”) that make regular silicon chips, he said.

Indeed, as part of the start-up’s “Phase 1” milestone of building chips with just one or two high-quality qubits at a conventional fab by June 30, 2025, Diraq had just taken delivery of some chips made by its unnamed, overseas fab partner.

“I can’t tell you specifically any results because we’re looking to make an announcement in due course, but what I can tell you is that the results are very, very positive,” he said.

Professor Simmons was contacted for comment.