Introducing Omega - Inside the Chipset
Today, PsiQuantum is announcing Omega, a manufacturable chipset for photonic quantum computing. Our manuscript, published in Nature, shares details of a feature-complete set of quantum photonic components, purpose-built to deliver million-qubit-scale systems. Every component has beyond-state-of-the-art performance. Omega integrates new materials and advanced components, including high-performance single photon sources, superconducting single photon detectors, and a next-generation optical switch, into a commercial semiconductor fab — the ultimate degree of maturity possible in semiconductor manufacturing.
Using this platform, we have demonstrated high-fidelity single-qubit operations, two-qubit fusion, and a simple, long-range qubit interconnect. In addition, we have introduced a new, simpler, higher-power category of cooling solution for photonic quantum computers, retiring the iconic “chandelier”.
We are incredibly proud to announce this milestone and excited to share the results with the community. We believe that Omega represents a foundational shift in a space that is often seen as being confined to research labs — a high-fidelity, scalable platform on which we are now actively building the world’s first useful quantum computers.
A PsiQuantum wafer containing Barium Titanate (BTO)
20 years ago, our founding team made some of the first breakthroughs in photonic quantum computing. We realized the first two-qubit gate for single photons in Brisbane, Australia back in 2004, exposed a toy quantum processor to the public internet more than a decade ago, and introduced our fusion-based quantum computing (FBQC) architecture in 2015. At that point we left the research lab and started PsiQuantum with an exclusive focus on realizing the scale, maturity and performance needed to unlock the profound impact of utility-scale quantum computing.
We did so with the understanding that breakthroughs are only half the story — there is a very long road from a breakthrough result to a fully-integrated, high-performance, manufacturable technology. As far back as 20 years ago, we anticipated that a useful (i.e. error-corrected) quantum computer would require on the order of a million qubits — that number has remained approximately constant ever since. We formed a thesis that the only practical way to achieve this would be through direct leverage of the full might of high-volume semiconductor manufacturing — the same fabs, contract manufacturers, tools, processes and people that build billions of transistors and hundreds of thousands of GPUS.
Cross-section of the Omega chipset, showing individual components
Our qubit technology is based on single photons – individual particles of light – which are then manipulated using silicon photonic chip technology originally developed for telecom and datacenter networking applications. Starting from this established, commercial technology, we have built the full technology stack that allows us to generate, manipulate, transmit and detect photonic qubits within integrated quantum circuits. The critical components include waveguides, beamsplitters, bends, couplers, single photon sources, single photon detectors, fast optical switching and chip-to-fiber I/O coupling. All of these components existed in some form before we started the company, but we knew that for use in a quantum computer we would need to integrate these components together into a high-volume manufacturing process and improve their performance dramatically.
Starting over six years ago, we introduced new materials including a superconducting thin film — enabling highly efficient single-photon detection — and Barium Titanate (BTO) — an ultra-high-performance electro-optic material enabling fast routing of the photon, as well as low-loss Silicon Nitride waveguides — into the manufacturing process, first in small fabs and ultimately at GlobalFoundries in upstate New York. PsiQuantum has made and tested millions of devices and thousands of wafers of silicon, and today we perform around half a million device-level measurements per month.
Qubit benchmarking circuits
To evaluate the performance of Omega, we developed a suite of benchmarking circuits that rigorously test critical quantum operations, including single qubit initialization and measurement, two-qubit fusion, and chip-to-chip qubit interconnection. Each circuit incorporates the fundamental components required to generate, manipulate, and detect photonic qubits. By systematically benchmarking these key building blocks, we ensure that each component is on-track to meet the stringent performance requirements necessary for fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Our benchmarking circuits have yielded record-breaking quantum performance metrics, underscoring the maturity of our platform:
Single-Qubit State Preparation and Measurement (SPAM) Fidelity: 99.98% ± 0.01%, confirming near-perfect qubit initialization and readout.
Chip-to-Chip Qubit Interconnect Fidelity: 99.72% ± 0.04%, demonstrating high-fidelity qubit transmission over optical fiber.
Quantum Interference Visibility: 99.50% ± 0.25%, proving the indistinguishability of photons from independent sources
Two-Qubit Fusion Gate Fidelity: 99.22% ± 0.12%, validating the accuracy of our entangling operations.
Beyond high-performance components, these results affirm our ability to integrate and scale photonic qubits across multiple chips—a critical step toward practical, large-scale quantum computing.
PsiQuantum’s high-power cooling system, installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California
A key challenge in quantum computing is scalable cryogenic infrastructure. Traditional approaches rely on dilution refrigerators—the iconic “chandelier” systems—operating at millikelvin temperatures. However, photonic quantum computing allows us to take a fundamentally different approach. We have eliminated the chandelier in favor of a simpler, more powerful, and more manufacturable cuboid design, closer to the form factor of a standard datacenter server rack.
This new architecture is built around a high-power cryogenic module engineered for industrial scalability. Instead of fragile, bespoke refrigeration systems, our design integrates seamlessly with large-scale cryoplants, similar to those used in particle accelerators and fusion reactors. Operating at 2–4K—orders of magnitude warmer than other modalities—these cryogenic modules enable efficient, high-volume deployment of quantum computing infrastructure.
In collaboration with STFC Daresbury Laboratory in the UK and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US, we have successfully integrated our prototype cooling systems into existing industrial-scale high-power cryoplants. The next step is to optically interconnect multiple modules, leveraging our high-fidelity qubit transmission technology to build the large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers of the future.
Silicon Nitride waveguide loss improvement
Since publishing our findings, we have continued to refine and improve Omega’s components. The rapid and consistent reduction in Silicon Nitride waveguide loss is just one example of our progress. With each iteration, we push closer to unlocking utility-scale quantum computing.
For decades, photonic quantum computing was seen as a theoretical frontier—promising, but distant. Omega changes that. We now have the technology to manufacture and cool as many quantum chips as we could ever need. While we will continue refining performance and scaling production, the primary challenge ahead is systems integration: wiring these chips together into increasingly powerful systems. That work is already well underway at our facilities in the UK and at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US, where we are actively assembling and scaling multi-chip architectures.
This marks the transition from foundational breakthroughs to full-scale system deployment. The path to utility-scale quantum computing is now clear, and we are breaking ground this year on our first large-scale quantum computing sites in Brisbane and Chicago. The era of practical, industrially manufactured quantum computing has arrived—and we are building it now.