CMOS stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor. It is the manufacturing technology used to make the vast majority of the world’s microchips, from processors and memory to the sensors in phones and cameras. Decades of investment have made CMOS extraordinarily precise and reliable, capable of producing billions of transistors on a single chip.
The relevance of CMOS to quantum computing comes from how silicon spin qubits are made. Because a silicon quantum dot can be formed using gate structures similar to those in a conventional transistor, silicon spin qubits can be fabricated with the same CMOS processes and the same industrial foundries. This connects quantum hardware to a manufacturing ecosystem worth trillions of dollars.
For Quantum Motion, CMOS compatibility is the foundation of the whole approach. It means qubits can be produced at scale on standard wafers, and it opens the door to integrating classical control circuits alongside the qubits through Cryo-CMOS. The maturity of CMOS manufacturing is what makes building millions of qubits a credible engineering goal.