Silicon, at the most widely used starter material in semiconductor technologies, is highly familiar and easy to manage. Together with germanium, another semiconductor, structures can be created which catch individual electrons or their counterparts, referred to as holes, and use them as qubits.

Infineon Dresden is focusing on spin qubits in this kind of silicon/silicon-germanium heterostructure; these qubits are robust and fast and provide excellent scaling potentials. The principle entails what is referred to as a quantum dot, in which appropriate fence electrodes are used to "round up" a two-dimensional sea of electrons until ultimately only one single electron is left. The spin of this individual electron is a natural quantum system in which the direction of spin represents the information carried by the qubit.

In Dresden Infineon is working together primarily with RWTH Aachen University, the Leibniz Institute IHP Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics IHP and the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS).