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IMAC and IU will pursue collaborative projects, including research led by Indiana University's Center for Reliable and Trusted Electronics.

The university says the partnership will also create new opportunities for talent development as well as industry collaboration.

An Indiana port is getting a big infusion of cash to modernize and expand operations.

You know, the seven nanonodes, the five nanonodes are basically planned on the way.

If you look at roadmaps, actually this is a roadmap coming from IMEC, you see this transition from FinFETs to lateral or horizontal nanowires to vertical nanowires.

And then these slides actually fade out because you go into the future beyond, you know, this five, seven year horizon.

But my belief is that there are many interesting technologies.

And actually, this can be done, for example, after design by configuring the devices, or even in a dy-dynamic way.

Now, interesting enough, this concept of doing controllable, uh, switching can be applied to some other ma-ma materials.

This is a picture of some work that we did with IMEC about one year ago.

And here it shows another kind of strange material, which is, uh, uh, wolfram and tungsten diselenide.

And as long as there are charge traps and defects in there that can switch their charge state, you get electric noise as well.

iMac has done a great job already kind of improving that process in their process line.

And they got charged noise values that are an order of magnitude better than what we had in our university devices beforehand.

But there's still some optimization that can be done and for that noise to be improved.

When I got into it, well, there was a former colleague of ours, uh, Peter Pumens, and I put in a proposal to this after seeing Ted's paper.

Peter's now at IMEC.

And so that, uh, was, uh, circa 2007 or so.

And actually, Nick, um, uh, I emailed him because I knew he'd done some cool diamond work, and I thought diamond might be good for thermionics.

Minitech, yes.

And up in Belgium is IMEC, which is a really big semiconductor foundry.

We've also got the one in Albany, New York, that's kind of joint between IBM and SUNY Albany.

Yeah.

One is that Tia Nano covers all kinds of... products line.

We even take care of MEMS and carbon nanotubes and even the batteries.

So it's a larger consortium than I think the Minitech or IMEC or even Albany.

That's one thing.

And James, what I hear from you is your main priority at the moment is tuning the control pulses and the individual qubit.

Is that correct? Because normally for traditional semiconductors, I always look like, okay, what is the iMac roadmap and what technologies are coming? When are the nodes, when we move into lower nodes and what are the...

the improvements on the technology roadmap.

And in that way, I wanted to ask you, okay, what could high NA EUV bring? IMAC did a test and they, especially on spin cubits, but is this a priority for you? You say, yes, of course it helps, better, smaller, but, or you say, well, actually what we actually need to get right is the

As you may know, we've just announced that IMEC have joined the group of investors who have invested in us.

We've worked with IMEC for about 15 years now, so even before the start of this company, the founders were.

High NA is very important to us precisely because if you remember, those three things that I said were important, right? Materials, the sort of gate patterning to define the electrostatic environment and the magnetic control.

What IMEC can control is how well can the gates be patterned and that does really deeply impact everything else because if they're patterned better, if the electrostatic fields are more precisely what they want them to be rather than because of any errors happening, that makes everything a lot easier.

It also resists oxidation and, unlike copper, it can be directly etched, and that unlocks whole new subtractive integration schemes.

IMEC has built its semi-damascene flow around exactly this, proposing direct metal etch at eighteen nanometer pitch and below, and they presented integration of ruthenium direct metal etch interconnect with copper single damascene at IEDC 2026.

And ALD is the enabling deposition mode here because seedless, void-free ruthenium in a trench a few nanometers wide is not something you can sputter Third material, molybdenum, the tungsten replacement that happened fast.

Molybdenum's argument is the same shape as ruthenium's, a short mean free path, no need for the titanium nitride barrier and nucleation layer that tungsten demands.

For a conduction electron in silicon, that g factor is very close to two, which works out to about twenty-eight gigahertz per tesla.

So at the zero point seven tesla field used in the IMEC devices I'll come back to later, those two spin states are separated by roughly eighty-one microelectron volts, which is about nineteen point six gigahertz.

Call spin down zero, call spin up one, and congratulations, you have a qubit.

That's precisely the proposal Daniel Loss and David DiVincenzo wrote down back in 1998.

And if you use the phosphorus-31 nuclear spin inside enriched silicon-28, coherence measured in seconds.

And those middle numbers aren't theoretical projections.

Those are measured values on the IMEC foundry devices.

Dephasing time of forty point six microseconds, Hahn echo coherence of one point nine milliseconds, and a spin relaxation time of up to nine point five seconds.