Students design and test quantum chips in our “Quantum Tapeout” course

In Fall 2025, 30 students in 10 teams took the first offering of EE290, Superconducting Quantum Circuits (aka “Quantum Tapeout”). Each team designed its own superconducting qubit chip, and in December the students tested their fabricated chips, measuring qubit lifetimes, readout resonator frequencies and dispersive shifts.

A fabricated chip from the course, showing student qubit designs — A fabricated chip with student qubit designs

You can read more about the course in this article from the Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation:

ciqc.berkeley.edu/from-theory-to-tapeout-berkeley-students-design-and-test-quantum-chips-in-first-of-its-kind-course

Many thanks to the NSF Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation (CIQC) for making this first offering possible, to Keysight Quantum Solutions for the support, and to Andrew Keller, Shahriar Aghaei and Alexis Morvan for the great guest lectures. Special thanks go to Kangdi (Kerry) Yu, who did a lot of the heavy lifting to make the course a success, including fabricating the chips in the Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory.

The course materials (except videos) are available on our Teaching page. We hope they will be useful to the community, and we plan to make this a regular offering in UC Berkeley EECS.