Over the last 20 years there has been a steady increase in fundamental physics research and the hardware development needed to realize a quantum computer. However, in the last 5 years we have seen a dramatic increase in the interest from industry, including a variety of major semiconductor and technology leaders such as IBM, Google and Intel. This is the result of both a better understanding of the variety of problems that can be addressed and the impact that will come with quantum computing along with the emergence of a couple of potentially scalable hardware solutions. In a recent interview with a leading manufacturer, an aggressive strategy was laid out to achieve an operational 1000-qubit quantum computer within 5 years that can solve a variety of problems not addressable by conventional computing and the 10-year prospect to achieve a 1 million qubit machine that would “profoundly change society”. The major technology leaders view quantum information (QI) as a technology that they must begin to develop and understand today. Augmenting existing technology with QI is desirable, but , there are a variety of technical challenges to making silicon-based QI systems with the needed quantum properties and coherence times. New challenges in atomic precision and individual atom or electron effects that fundamentally affect device performance bring on a variety of new manufacturing and metrology challenges. Measuring electron spin coherence, exchange energies, and qubit fidelity are entirely new measurements for the semiconductor industry. Even the resolution of TEM may be inadequate, as TEM of a nominally 80 nm thick slice of silicon which averages many atoms together in a measurement where only one or two atoms can deeply change device performance, coherence times, or introduce charge offsets. After developing some of the first cold atom and ion trap quantum information demonstrations at NIST, we are now investing significantly in developing the supporting metrology and modeling methods needed to help industry develop and commercialize this new technology. In this presentation we will provide an overview of hardware solutions for quantum computing, future metrology needs and challenges to enable manufacturable quantum computers. Although industry leaders are now investing in superconducting qubits and silicon-based qubits, the two leading technologies, this talk will primarily focus on the principles of solid state silicon QI operation, manufacturing metrology solutions, and measurements needed to develop and evaluate viable technological solutions.
Over the last 20 years there has been a steady increase in fundamental physics research and the hardware development needed to realize a quantum computer. However, in the last 5 years we have seen a dramatic increase in the interest from industry, including a variety of major semiconductor and technology leaders such as IBM, Google and Intel. This is the result of both a better understanding of the variety of problems that can be addressed and the impact that will come with quantum computing along with the emergence of a couple of potentially scalable hardware solutions. In a recent interview with a leading manufacturer, an aggressive strategy was laid out to achieve an operational 1000-qubit quantum computer within 5 years that can solve a variety of problems not addressable by conventional computing and the 10-year prospect to achieve a 1 million qubit machine that would “profoundly change society”. The major technology leaders view quantum information (QI) as a technology that they must begin to develop and understand today. Augmenting existing technology with QI is desirable, but , there are a variety of technical challenges to making silicon-based QI systems with the needed quantum properties and coherence times. New challenges in atomic precision and individual atom or electron effects that fundamentally affect device performance bring on a variety of new manufacturing and metrology challenges. Measuring electron spin coherence, exchange energies, and qubit fidelity are entirely new measurements for the semiconductor industry. Even the resolution of TEM may be inadequate, as TEM of a nominally 80 nm thick slice of silicon which averages many atoms together in a measurement where only one or two atoms can deeply change device performance, coherence times, or introduce charge offsets. After developing some of the first cold atom and ion trap quantum information demonstrations at NIST, we are now investing significantly in developing the supporting metrology and modeling methods needed to help industry develop and commercialize this new technology. In this presentation we will provide an overview of hardware solutions for quantum computing, future metrology needs and challenges to enable manufacturable quantum computers. Although industry leaders are now investing in superconducting qubits and silicon-based qubits, the two leading technologies, this talk will primarily focus on the principles of solid state silicon QI operation, manufacturing metrology solutions, and measurements needed to develop and evaluate viable technological solutions.
Quantum computing has been a long-anticipated emerging computational paradigm to complement and compete with conventional CMOS technologies. The last decade has featured reports of the initial development of using CMOS processing techniques for qubits and the atomistic fabrication of single atom transistors. Will the semiconductor industry embrace this new architype, and if so, how? When quantum devices begin to scale as predicted, will our industry be ready to integrate radically different architectures and device structures? Are there known obstacles not yet addressed that would enable the industry to more readily adopt and benefit from today’s achievements in the laboratory? What are the emerging designs and the potential fundamental challenges that are to be overcome? We have assembled a panel of experts that will share their insights on the state-of-the-art in quantum computing as well as intellectual leaders that will share their vision of the eventual merger of these new technologies with our computing capabilities today, even as lithography is approaching the near-atomic domain. Join us as we discuss the impending critical impact of quantum computing on the semiconductor industry.
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.
It is increasingly accepted that all commercially useful quantum computing applications require error-correction and therefore at least 1 million physical qubits. The manufacturing capability and expertise of the semiconductor industry are needed to deliver a commercially useful quantum computer on any reasonable time or money scale. In this talk, we will show how unique technology in the areas of silicon photonics and quantum system architecture enable the path to manufacturability and scalability of a fault-tolerant, general-purpose 1-milliion qubit quantum computer.
Quantum computing is one of the grand challenges of the 21st century and promises to transform almost every industry. As quantum computing technology exits the academic research phase into manufacturing, the goal is not to build single, unique qubits, but millions of interconnected, identical qubits capable of performing fully error corrected, general purpose calculations. 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.
Quantum computing is one of the grand challenges of the 21st century and promises to transform almost every industry. As quantum computing technology exits the academic research phase into manufacturing, the goal is not to build single, unique qubits, but millions of interconnected, identical qubits capable of performing fully error corrected, general purpose calculations. 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.