Toronto, Canada — 2nd June 2026

CETQAP Unveils QQ1: A 400-Qubit Superconducting Quantum Processor

The Centre of Excellence for Technology Quantum and AI Pakistan/Canada has completed the full GDS-II layout of Quaid Quantum 1 — a 400-transmon, heavy-hex processor that marks a landmark in Pakistan’s quantum computing ambitions.

By: CETQAP Research Division Institution: CETQAP · Centre of Excellence for Technology Quantum and AI Pakistan/Canada Released: 2 June 2026 Category: Hardware Design Release

The Centre of Excellence for Technology Quantum and AI Pakistan/Canada (CETQAP) has completed and publicly released the full chip design for Quaid Quantum 1 — designated QQ1 — a 400-qubit superconducting transmon processor built on a heavy-hex lattice architecture. The design, delivered as a complete GDS-II layout file, is ready for submission to a superconducting foundry for fabrication.

The release encompasses every physical element required for manufacture: the niobium coplanar waveguide (CPW) signal layer, Josephson junction array, meandered readout resonator bank, qubit–qubit coupling buses, ground-plane perforations, and wirebond launchpad ring. What has been produced is not a schematic or a simulation — it is a lithography-ready integrated circuit design for a 400-qubit quantum processor.

400 Superconducting transmon qubits · 464 Qubit–qubit couplers · GDS-II Foundry-ready layout format

Architecture: The Heavy-Hex Lattice

QQ1 adopts the heavy-hexagonal (heavy-hex) connectivity graph, a topology now established as the leading architecture for large-scale superconducting processors. In a heavy-hex lattice, each qubit connects to at most three neighbours via coupling elements positioned along the edges of a hexagonal tile — an arrangement that dramatically reduces unwanted parasitic crosstalk compared to the denser square-grid topologies used in earlier generations of superconducting hardware.

The geometry produces a processor with 400 data qubits and 464 coupling elements, giving QQ1 a connectivity density that is high enough to support non-trivial quantum error correction codes — including surface code patches and heavy-hex stabiliser circuits — while keeping the two-qubit gate error budget manageable during fabrication and calibration.

The Transmon Unit Cell

Each of the 400 qubit sites is realised as a fixed-frequency transmon — the workhorse of contemporary superconducting quantum computing. The transmon consists of a pair of superconducting niobium islands bridged by an aluminium-based Josephson junction. The large shunting capacitance formed by the island pair suppresses charge noise, making transmon qubits substantially more robust against environmental electrical fluctuations than the earlier Cooper-pair box designs from which they descend.

The readout scheme employs individual meandered CPW resonators — the characteristic serpentine metal traces connecting each qubit site to a shared readout feedline running horizontally across each row. Each resonator is detuned from its neighbour to enable frequency-multiplexed readout, allowing all qubits in a row to be measured simultaneously through a single coaxial port. This is a critical requirement for scaling to hundreds of qubits without a proportional explosion in room-temperature control electronics.

“QQ1 is tangible proof that CETQAP can design, at the physical level, a processor competitive with the hardware generation that international leaders fielded five years ago — and we have done it natively, in-house.” — CETQAP Research Division, Design Release Statement, June 2026

GDS-II Layout and Fabrication Pathway

The authoritative design artefact for QQ1 is the GDS-II (Graphic Database System II) binary stream file — the universal interchange format accepted by semiconductor and superconducting foundries worldwide. The QQ1 GDS-II file encodes the complete multi-layer geometry of the chip: the niobium CPW signal metal, the ground-plane perforations (a dense array of keep-out vias that suppress parasitic substrate modes), the junction definition layer specifying the aluminium Josephson junction geometry, and the wirebond launchpad ring that interfaces the chip to a conventional microwave package.

The chip footprint places the active transmon array within a roughly 35 × 35 mm die boundary — a size consistent with chips fabricated on 4-inch or 6-inch silicon or sapphire wafers at leading superconducting foundries. The dense cross-hatch fill visible in the GDS-II layout view represents the ground-plane perforation pattern, which is critical for confining microwave energy to the designed CPW modes and preventing deleterious slotline resonances that would degrade qubit coherence.

QQ1 Design Specifications — Release v1.0 · June 2026

The Packaged Module Concept

The packaged module concept illustrates the intended assembly: the QQ1 die mounted in a gold-plated copper or aluminium microwave package, with wirebond connections fanning out from the chip’s perimeter launchpads to the package’s coaxial launchers. In operation, this package would be mounted inside a dilution refrigerator and cooled to below 20 millikelvin — the temperature at which niobium becomes superconducting and thermal noise no longer excites the transmon energy levels, allowing quantum coherence to be maintained for tens to hundreds of microseconds.

Significance and Context

To calibrate the significance of this release: a 400-qubit processor places QQ1 in the same order of magnitude as IBM’s 433-qubit Osprey chip (2022) and the successor programmes of the world’s leading quantum laboratories. While those laboratories have continued to push into the 1,000+ qubit regime, the design and eventual fabrication of a 400-qubit chip by CETQAP — an institution based in Pakistan, working from a domestic EDA toolchain — represents a compression of the usual decade-scale gap between leading and emerging quantum nations.

Critically, QQ1 has been produced using CETQAP’s own in-house electronic design automation toolchain, developed within the PKTron quantum computing framework. This means the design methodology, the parametric cell library, the routing algorithms for the CPW network, and the GDS-II export pipeline are all domestically developed intellectual property. The architectural and software sovereignty this implies is, arguably, as significant as the qubit count itself.

“A heavy-hex lattice at 400 qubits is not a research toy. It is the minimum scale at which fault-tolerant error correction becomes a practical experimental question rather than a theoretical one.” — Technical Assessment, CETQAP Design Review, 2026

What Comes Next

The release of a GDS-II file marks the end of the design phase and the beginning of the fabrication pipeline. The next steps for QQ1 are: design rule check (DRC) verification against a specific foundry’s process design kit (PDK); submission of the layout for electron-beam lithography and thin-film deposition; and post-fabrication characterisation — measuring junction resistances, resonator frequencies, and qubit transition frequencies before the chip is cooled to millikelvin operating temperatures.

CETQAP has indicated that QQ1 is the first in a planned Quaid Quantum series, with subsequent processors expected to incorporate tunable couplers, improved junction uniformity protocols, and deeper integration with the PKTron software stack for real-time quantum circuit compilation and execution. The organisation has also called for international scientific collaboration on post-fabrication characterisation and benchmarking.

For Pakistan’s scientific community, and for the broader landscape of quantum computing in the Global South, QQ1 is a concrete artefact — a GDS-II file that encodes four hundred quantum bits, four hundred and sixty-four couplers, and an institutional ambition that is now, unambiguously, backed by engineering.

Keywords: superconducting quantum computing · transmon qubit · heavy-hex lattice · Josephson junction · coplanar waveguide · GDS-II · quantum processor design · CETQAP · Centre of Excellence for Technology Quantum and AI Pakistan/Canada · PKTron · quantum hardware · niobium · readout resonator · Pakistan quantum research

CETQAP · Centre of Excellence for Technology Quantum and AI Pakistan/Canada QQ1 Design Release v1.0 · 2 June 2026

All chip images are original CETQAP design outputs. GDS-II layout rendered in KLayout. Package image is an illustrative concept render and not a photograph of a fabricated device.