September 2, 2024 -- Bluefors is participating in the first European Chips Joint undertaking project, ARCTIC (“Advanced Research on Cryogenic Technologies for Innovative Computing”). The project intends to establish a complete and comprehensive European supply chain for cryogenic photonics, microelectronics, and cryogenic microsystems around the emerging quantum computing industry and different cryogenics-enabled ICT applications.

The development of these technologies addresses demands from various fields that rely on cryogenic microsystems and quantum computing, such as computational chemistry, medical and life sciences, cryptography needed for data protection, and cybersecurity.

The research consortium, coordinated by Imec, brings together 36 partners from 11 countries from industry, academia and leading research and technology organizations (RTOs). The project activities include the development of materials and fabrication processes, novel simulation approaches, heterogeneous packaging, and the optimization of devices and circuits specifically designed for operation at cryogenic temperatures.

ARCTIC brings together technology developers, technology integrators, modelers, designers, system/application players and end users to ensure smooth interfacing between different layers. At the same time, significant effort is placed on solving missing links – for example, in the cryo-modeling and standardization space. The European R&D ecosystem is strongly leveraged in the project, with RTOs collaborating and building a bridge between academic innovation models and industrial adoption.

The project began earlier this year and will continue until 2027. In addition to Bluefors, the Finnish members of the consortium include VTT (which leads the Finnish sub-consortium), IQM, Okmetic, Picosun, Quantrolox, SemiQon and University of Tampere.