IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), in collaboration with Element Six, a De Beers Group company, has developed high-quality, quantum-grade diamond films. These films are compatible with standard semiconductor manufacturing techniques, representing an advancement in creating hardware for building large-scale quantum networks and clustered computing. The advancement overcomes a previous limitation where the stringent material requirements for producing diamond-based devices restricted fabrication to bespoke, R&D-scale techniques not viable for reliable, at-scale production.
The new approach allows for the bonding of quantum-grade diamond films onto common substrates like silicon and silicon nitride. This enables two capabilities: foundry compatibility, where synthetic diamond quantum devices can be produced using the same tools and processes as the semiconductor industry, and heterogeneous integration, which allows for combining diamond-based quantum memories with non-diamond-based devices on a single chip. The ability to industrialize thin-film quantum-grade diamonds opens new possibilities for IonQ’s computing and networking roadmap and for adjacent fields such as quantum sensing.
This advancement is intended to accelerate the production of scalable quantum systems and move toward manufacturing quantum networks and compute devices at an industrial level. The news builds on the recent completion of IonQ’s Lightsynq acquisition, and on IonQ’s continued progress on its photonic interconnect roadmap. Element Six specializes in synthetic diamond advanced material solutions.
Read the full announcement here, and the research preprint is available on the arXiv here.
September 4, 2025
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