Information has long been described by physical structures. The spectacularly successful modern computers use silicon transistors to hold and process information. A number of attempts to repeat the success with other kinds of solid-state devices have failed. The reasons for the unique success of silicon transistors are found in the requirements of computing, the properties of transistors, and the variability in devices manufactured in the large quantities needed to build large computing systems. New challenges will be met in building quantum computers to meet the same requirements.
Information has long been described by physical structures. The spectacularly successful modern computers use silicon transistors to hold and process information. A number of attempts to repeat the success with other kinds of solid-state devices have failed. The reasons for the unique success of silicon transistors are found in the requirements of computing, the properties of transistors, and the variability in devices manufactured in the large quantities needed to build large computing systems. New challenges will be met in building quantum computers to meet the same requirements.
Over the past several decades, quantum information science has emerged to seek answers to the question: can we gain some advantage by storing, transmitting and processing information encoded in systems that exhibit unique quantum properties? Today it is understood that the answer is yes, and many research groups around the world are working towards the highly ambitious technological goal of building a quantum computer, which would dramatically improve computational power for particular tasks. A number of physical systems, spanning much of modern physics, are being developed for quantum computation. However, it remains unclear which technology, if any, will ultimately prove successful. Here we describe the latest developments for each of the leading approaches and explain the major challenges for the future. This review outlines the principles of operation of quantum computers and their elements. The theory of ideal computers that do not interact with the environment and are immune to quantum decohering processes is presented. Decohering processes in quantum computers are investigated. The review considers methods for correcting quantum computing errors arising from the decoherence of the state of the quantum computer, as well as possible methods for the suppression of the decohering processes. A brief enumeration of proposed quantum computer realizations concludes the review.
Electronic systems that contain a large number of solid-state devices must deal with the fact that there are likely to be differences between nominally identical components. Methods for manufacturing solid-state devices do not produce highly reproducible products, and solid-state devices change with age and use. Quantum computing systems propose to use the same binary digital language to represent information and describe operations. However, quantum computing is not truly digital; each qubit supplies a signal that depends on its properties rather than being obtained from some standard that is known throughout the system to which it belongs. Quantum computing hardware does not form zeros and ones in some standard way that insures that a signal will be properly interpreted in another place in the system to which it belongs. This absence of a way to produce a truly digital signal leaves quantum logic at the mercy of variability in devices.
There are signs that we are approaching a technical revolution that might take humankind’s computational capabilities to a new level. Quantum Computing leverages the principles of quantum mechanics, enabling the computational power to solve specific problems currently intractable for classical computers (e.g., cracking cryptographic keys). Since we are getting to a point where we can no longer build smaller, more powerful, more efficient devices with conventional methodologies, we need to think of new ways for technological progress. The manufacturing of microchips is reaching its limits in the use of traditional architectures. Hence, new and more advanced technologies need to address the challenges of increasing energy consumption and data processing. Connectivity, scalable architectures and concepts like Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service have already helped to scale computational-intense applications in the last years and have attracted the interest of IS researchers (e.g., Benlian et al. 2009 ; Benlian et al. 2018 ; Messerschmidt and Hinz 2013 ). Looking ahead to the next generation, computing will comprise technologies that enable high-performance applications far beyond today’s possibilities. One prominent example with a disruptive potential is Quantum Computing. While there are abundant open questions and directions for further developments, researchers in this area have made substantial progress in the last decade, indicating that, after medical imaging, lasers, and superconductors, another quantum-technological innovation might be approaching. We, therefore, intend to provide an overview of the current state of Quantum Computing research and outline how this new technology might stimulate research in Information Systems.
Quantum computing is the grand challenge of the 21st century and is poised to revolutionizes our daily lives on a nearly unfathomable level. To truly understand the impact, we must first build a universal, fully error corrected machine capable of exploring the application space envisioned by both academic and industry. Numerous pathways have been identified and demonstrated to fabricate single, unique qubits using a myriad of platforms (superconducting, ions, nanoparticles, photons, etc…). However, it is now widely accepted that a truly useful quantum computer will require millions of interconnected, identical qubits to perform fully error corrected, general purpose calculations. To that end, photon-based qubits offer a path to such a general-purpose machine by leveraging the mature silicon photonics high-volume manufacturing ecosystem. Creating quantum devices from silicon photonics components requires patterning innovation to bring leading-edge nanolithography to near macroscopic scale, a unique challenge for an industry where the future relies on progressive device shrink.
The computer industry has followed Moore's Law closely and faithfully over the past few decades. However, transistors cannot continue to shrink at their current rate forever, and new methods of computation must be explored. Quantum computation is one such method that has received much attention over the past few years and will heavily rely on technological advances in the smart electronics and nanotechnology arena. In this review, we will present some of the problems facing classical computers and why quantum computers may be a viable alternative. We will briefly describe some of the "killer" quantum applications, such as Deutsch's, Shor's and Grover's algorithms that demonstrate the computational powers of quantum computation. Kane's solid state quantum computer in silicon promises to demonstrate some of these applications. However there remain many significant technological difficulties which will need to be overcome if we are to see a useful quantum computer. The main technological challenges, for Kane's solid-state computer, of interest to the smart materials and structures community, will be highlighted.
Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology has radically reshaped the world by taking humanity to the digital age. Cramming more transistors into the same physical space has enabled an exponential increase in computational performance, a strategy that has been recently hampered by the increasing complexity and cost of miniaturization. To continue achieving significant gains in computing performance, new computing paradigms, such as quantum computing, must be developed. However, finding the optimal physical system to process quantum information, and scale it up to the large number of qubits necessary to build a general-purpose quantum computer, remains a significant challenge. Recent breakthroughs in nanodevice engineering have shown that qubits can now be manufactured in a similar fashion to silicon field-effect transistors, opening an opportunity to leverage the know-how of the CMOS industry to address the scaling challenge. In this article, we focus on the analysis of the scaling prospects of quantum computing systems based on CMOS technology.