Boffins at Xanadu and HyperLight have emerged from their smoke-filled labs claiming they cut optical switch losses to seven millidecibels, tackling a practical obstacle to building larger photonic quantum computers.
According to Canadian Manufacturing, the figure improves on the 20 millidecibels the partners achieved in 2025. Their switches use thin-film lithium niobate, or TFLN, technology to route photons carrying quantum information.
Losing photons is inconvenient when those photons contain the information needed for the calculation. A quantum computer needs a better survival rate than the average corporate expense claim. Insertion loss measures how much optical signal disappears as it passes through a component. Keeping that loss low becomes increasingly important as a system grows and photons encounter more switches.
Quantum information makes the problem particularly awkward. Engineers cannot simply amplify an unknown quantum signal conventionally and expect its delicate state to survive intact.
Lower losses therefore reduce the burden on the rest of the machine. Xanadu says the improvement should help it scale photonic networks with less additional hardware and lower power overheads.
The companies demonstrated the result using a high-volume wafer manufacturing line on HyperLight’s TFLN Chiplet platform. They claim good manufacturing yields and repeatability, although the announcement supplies no numerical yield figures.
Xanadu founder and chief executive Christian Weedbrook said the switches were “ready to ramp to production”.
Weedbrook expects the improvement to reduce system size and improve manufacturing economics. Those remain projections: a better switch still has to earn its keep inside a complete computer.
The nearly threefold improvement refers specifically to the insertion-loss figure. It provides no basis for claiming a quantum computer runs three times faster, however tempting that might look in a presentation.
HyperLight chief executive Mian Zhang said the same manufacturing platform serves AI data centres and telecoms networks. The partners are seeking to bring those manufacturing capabilities to quantum hardware.
