This may also spell an earlier demise for Moore’s Law
The emerging power and exponential growth of Quantum Computing in recent years have people questioning the validity of Moore’s Law — coined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 which deduced that computing power roughly doubled every 12 months while the price got cheaper at the same time.
Moore’s Law has fueled chip innovation for the past 50 years, but the recent revolutionary developments in Computing technology point towards an end to the transistor-based era. With Google & IBM developing the next-gen quantum computers and players like Microsoft & Amazon offering Cloud-based quantum computing services, the era of computing growth benchmark in the form of Moore’s Law is perhaps may lose its validity sooner than later.
There is still this argument in the scientific community that current quantum computing technology is too expensive with its reliance on exotic materials like superconducting metals, levitated atoms, or diamonds. And it would be a while before we can come up with ways to create inexpensive quantum computers like the one Google claims to have created recently — took 20 seconds to perform a highly complex calculation which would have taken the most powerful supercomputer right now about 10,000 years.
As the miniaturized electronics approach their physical limits, it’s becoming challenging to produce cheaper & advanced computer chips, thus the breakdown of Moore’s Law. Researchers may now have found a way around this — In a groundbreaking discovery, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have devised a way to produce quantum states in ordinary, everyday electronics.
“This work brings us one step closer to the realization of systems capable of storing and distributing quantum information across the world’s fiber-optic networks. Such quantum networks would bring about a novel class of technologies allowing for the creation of unhackable communication channels, the teleportation of single electron states and the realization of a quantum internet.”
— David Awschalom, Lead Researcher
For those of you who don’t know, quantum computing offers the processing of information via Qubits with their ability to exist simultaneously in both states 0 and 1, unlike the traditional binary 1/0 architecture. While the standard electronics are considered too crude to support the quantum states, exotic materials required for quantum computers are too expensive.
David Awschalom’s team has found an innovative way to address this problem — they used silicon carbide, which is cheaper and can be used to electrically control quantum states. His team detailed this concept in the two papers published on how they could electrically control quantum states in silicon carbide employing the traditional electronic circuits.
Not just this, the use of silicon carbide provided the added advantage whereby its quantum states emit single photons of light in a wavelength near the telecommunications band. This would not only enable to utilize the existing fiber-optic networks for data transmission but help in creating new devices — the team was able to create what they called a “quantum FM radio,” a device capable of sending quantum information over long distances like radio waves.
The researchers were able to achieve another breakthrough — a very common problem of noise in quantum communication. To the surprise of the team, they were able to free the quantum signal from noise while the signal being stable at the same time by the use of a simple diode (one-way switch for electrons).
These are all fascinating finds and could provide a major paradigm shift in the move towards quantum computing. The detailed research was published in two journals — Science and Science Advances respectively.
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