Digital quantum hardware developer SEEQC, Inc. has announced its participation as a subcontractor in the multi-year Microelectronics Commons Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub (NORDTECH) program. Funded via the CHIPS and Science Act, the project is led by NY CREATES and includes partners such as Cornell, Princeton, NYU, Syracuse, Quantum Circuits/D-Wave, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The primary engineering objective is to transition high-coherence superconducting qubit manufacturing out of academic cleanrooms and into a high-yield, automated 300mm industrial silicon wafer fabrication environment.
To suppress the dielectric losses that limit baseline qubit coherence times, the consortium is optimizing advanced refractory materials, specifically tantalum (Ta) and tantalum nitride (TaN), within the 300mm industrial manufacturing line. Transferring these ultra-low-loss material processing techniques onto large-scale production lines allows the consortium to establish the highly repeatable fabrication tolerances and cross-wafer yield metrics required to manufacture multi-qubit processor topologies at a commercial scale.
Within this hardware lifecycle, SEEQC is responsible for building a high-throughput cryogenic qubit evaluation platform to provide rapid characterization feedback to the central fabrication teams. Additionally, SEEQC is developing one of the industry’s first standardized quantum Process Design Kits (PDK) integrated into the Cadence EDA ecosystem. This automation framework ensures the resulting qubit designs are structurally compatible with SEEQC’s digital Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) control architecture, paving the way for hybrid, multi-tier quantum computing systems.
The official NORDTECH project tracks and funding details can be reviewed here. For an analysis of parallel manufacturing allocations across the NY CREATES prototyping lines, check the report here, and track individual corporate chip specifications on the SEEQC platform here.
June 16, 2026
