Xanadu partners with ASML to address optical loss in photonic quantum chips

Xanadu Quantum Technologies, the Canadian company betting that photons are the future of quantum computing, just locked in a partnership with ASML, the Dutch giant whose lithography machines are already the backbone of the semiconductor industry. The goal: fix a deceptively simple problem that’s been quietly throttling photonic quantum hardware.

That problem is optical loss caused by line edge roughness, or LER. When lithography tools etch the tiny waveguides that carry photons across a quantum chip, the edges aren’t perfectly smooth. Those microscopic imperfections scatter light, and in quantum computing, scattered light means lost information. For a technology that needs near-perfect photon preservation to function, even nanometer-scale roughness is a dealbreaker.

ASML is best known for building the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems that companies like TSMC and Samsung use to manufacture the world’s most advanced classical chips. This partnership marks ASML’s entry into the quantum photonics space.

The collaboration will focus on developing lithography processes specifically tailored for Xanadu’s photonic quantum hardware. Stan Baron, ASML’s Senior Vice President, pointed to the opportunity to explore next-generation photonics applications and refine manufacturing approaches as the technology matures.

Xanadu, which trades on both NASDAQ and TSX under the ticker XNDU, isn’t treating this as a research curiosity. The company has laid out a roadmap targeting more than 1,000 logical qubits by 2031. For context, logical qubits are the error-corrected, reliable qubits that can actually perform useful computation, as opposed to the noisy physical qubits that most quantum companies count when they announce headline numbers.

Xanadu is also building a dedicated manufacturing facility in Toronto called Inception. The project carries a total price tag of CAD $893 million, with CAD $195 million coming from Canadian federal funding. The ASML collaboration feeds directly into what tools and processes that facility will use.

“Achieving fault tolerance and error correction is paramount for the quantum computing industry,” said Dr. Christian Weedbrook, Xanadu’s CEO, noting that the partnership gives the company access to advanced lithography processes that enhance its hardware development capabilities.

The quantum computing industry is fractured across multiple hardware approaches: superconducting qubits (IBM, Google), trapped ions (IonQ, Quantinuum), neutral atoms (QuEra, Pasqal), and photonics (Xanadu, PsiQuantum). PsiQuantum, its closest photonic rival, has its own foundry partnership with GlobalFoundries.