C12 unveils Pick & Place: a nanoassembly process to scale carbon nanotube quantum chip manufacturing
C12 today announces Pick & Place, a patented nanoassembly process to transfer individual carbon nanotubes onto quantum chips with micrometric precision.
Pick & Place is a core building block of how C12 envisions the scalable manufacturing of carbon nanotube quantum processors. A carbon nanotube is 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. Placing one on a chip is like placing a hair on a surface the size of Paris, accurate to within a few streets. By introducing an intermediate assembly step that decouples nanotube growth from chip fabrication, the process brings significantly more flexibility and modularity to C12's fabrication flow, while addressing one of the hardest challenges in quantum hardware manufacturing: qubit variability.
The process allows C12 to preselect and qualify individual carbon nanotubes before integration, enabling much tighter process control and guaranteeing the quality of the assembled devices. C12 is currently the only company capable of doing this through electrical prescreening at the qubit level.
The throughput numbers illustrate the step change in process maturity. With the process now streamlined and partially automated, C12 assembled 50 devices in the last four weeks. The same number took the entire year of 2025 to assemble using the previous method.
A step change in manufacturing throughput
This new manufacturing approach also enables the scaling integration of multi-qubit structures. C12's High-Density chip integrates 17 quantum devices on a single chip, breaking the ceiling of low CNT count chips, now only limited by the current density of devices on the chip. First announced by Pierre Desjardins at the Q2B conference in San Francisco, the HD chip serves as a proof point that precise multi-nanotube integration is both achievable and repeatable, while C12 continues to perfect its high-performance single and two-qubit building blocks.
"Pick & Place is directly inspired by techniques used in advanced semiconductor packaging, where the same concept enables very high throughput integration. We adapted it to the nanoscale to achieve deterministic assembly of carbon nanotubes, opening the same long-term opportunity for quantum chip manufacturing," said Matthieu Desjardins, co-founder, chairman, and CTO of C12.
Beyond the technical milestone, the technology adds a significant new layer to C12's IP portfolio alongside existing patents in qubit control, carbon nanotube growth, and quantum device architecture.
Building the infrastructure for the roadmap
The announcement follows C12's technology roadmap, published in April 2026, which targets four processor generations from Aïdôs (2027) to Panopeia (2033), scaling from a first logical qubit to over 100,000 physical qubits at utility scale. Reproducible manufacturing is one of the core challenges the roadmap must solve. Pick & Place is C12's answer, built and running today.
This milestone completes a broader sequence of progress: material foundations validated through a Nature Communications publication, error correction tooling secured through a partnership with QC Design, and hardware connected to the enterprise software ecosystem through an integration with Classiq. The manufacturing infrastructure to execute the roadmap is now in place.