China's QuantumCTek Ships Single-Core Dilution Refrigerator, Matching Top International Performance
China has reached a milestone in the critical infrastructure underpinning superconducting quantum computing. The first domestically developed ez-Q F1500 dilution refrigerator, engineered by QuantumCTek (Ke Da Guo Dun) under the guidance of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Quantum Information and Quantum Technology Innovation Institute, has officially rolled off the production line.
Dilution refrigerators are the indispensable workhorses that cool superconducting quantum chips to near absolute zero, providing the ultra-stable, noise-suppressed environment those chips need to function. As qubit counts climb from dozens into the hundreds and toward the thousands, refrigerators face a triple challenge: they must deliver far more cooling power, accommodate denser bundles of cryogenic cabling and signal amplifiers, and do it all without ballooning in complexity.
Most commercial single-core dilution refrigerators on the international market today deliver between 400 and 800 microwatts of cooling power at 100 millikelvin — a range that already falls short for the next generation of thousand-qubit machines. The standard industry workaround is to wire two or more cores in parallel, but that multiplies system complexity and introduces long-term reliability risks.
The ez-Q F1500 takes a different path. A single core alone delivers 1,700 microwatts at 100 mK and 48 microwatts at 20 mK, with a base temperature reaching approximately 5.42 mK. Those figures place the device squarely among the best single-core systems available globally. The breakthrough builds on a 2025 proof-of-concept from the CAS institute, which demonstrated 40 microwatts at 20 mK, before QuantumCTek pushed the design through two years of focused engineering.
According to Li Xu, the technical lead at the Anhui Quantum Information Engineering Technology Research Center, the team concentrated on three core problems: insufficient total cooling budget, uneven cold-power distribution, and cramped internal volume for cabling and peripherals. The resulting system runs on a fully self-controlled hardware and software stack — the pulse-tube cryocooler, temperature controllers, and ultra-low-temperature thermometers are all produced domestically, eliminating reliance on foreign suppliers.
QuantumCTek plans to begin shipping the ez-Q F1500 to users in the second half of this year. With a single-core architecture that sidesteps the complexity of parallel setups, the refrigerator could meaningfully simplify the design of future thousand-qubit error-correctable superconducting quantum computers — and give China a homegrown pillar in a supply chain long dominated by a handful of overseas vendors.