Few-electrode design for silicon MOS quantum dots

Silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) spin qubits have become a promising platform for quantum information processing, with recent demonstrations of high-fidelity single and two-qubit gates. To move beyond a few qubits, however, more scalable designs that reduce the fabrication complexity and electrode density are needed. Here, we introduce a two-metal-layer MOS quantum dot device in which tunnel barriers are naturally formed by gaps between electrodes and controlled by adjacent accumulation gates. The accumulation gates define the electron reservoirs and provide tunability of the tunnel rate of nearly 8.5 decades V−1, determined by a combination of charge sensor electron counting measurements and by direct transport. The valley splitting in the few-electron regime is probed by magneto-spectroscopy up to a field of 6 T, providing an estimate for the ground-state gap of 290 eV. We show preliminary characterization of a double quantum dot, demonstrating that this design can be extended to linear dot arrays that should be useful in applications like electron shuttling. These results motivate further innovations in MOS quantum dot design that can improve the scalability prospects for spin qubits.