ASX-listed semiconductor company Archer Materials (ASX: AXE) has increased its global presence as an industry leader, joining the Academia-Industry Collaboration Program, with a team to be based in Switzerland.

The program will allow Archer to establish a company business unit on-site at the Switzerland Innovation Park West École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (SIP West EPFL), as well as allow for business development and partnership opportunities with start-ups and multinationals. Membership within the innovation collaborative also strengthens Archer’s access to talent and partners in the semiconductor space across Europe.

The EPFL on-site base will mark Archer’s first move towards international expansion, with the company’s flagship technology, the 12CQ quantum chip, having 10 patents in Europe, which includes Switzerland. The technology was co-invented at EPFL, with which Archer has long-term collaborations in deep tech development.

The aim of the innovation parks is to host on their premises R&D groups, commercial and innovation business units of companies, and major international groups. They have attracted a number of well-known innovative companies such as Cisco, Merck, and Logitech, among many others.

The EPFL network includes six individual innovation parks across five Swiss Cantons. Archer is entering the AIC Program linked to the EPFL Innovation Park, but will have access to the other innovation parks during the six-month initiative, which may be extended.

The agreement is the first major announcement for Archer in 2023, following a series of major breakthroughs in 2022 which included building wettable graphene chips for its biosensor, and using mobile compatible technology to detect quantum information.

Quantum computing is a game changer for the computing industry, a technology which uses quantum mechanics to perform complex computations. In classical computing, data is represented in bits, which are either 0 or 1. In quantum computing, data is represented in quantum bits or qubits, which can be in multiple states simultaneously, enabling the processing of vast amounts of data in ways which may not be achievable by modern classical chips like CPUs and GPUs.

Given the potential of quantum computing to impact almost all industries reliant on increasing computational power, investment in quantum around the world has grown significantly in recent years, with Archer the only ASX-listed company developing a qubit processor.