The world’s largest chip company sees a novel path toward computers of immense power.
Sometimes the solution to a problem is staring you in the face all
along. Chip maker Intel is betting that will be true in the race to
build quantum computers—machines that should offer immense processing
power by exploiting the oddities of quantum mechanics.
Competitors
IBM, Microsoft, and Google are all developing quantum components that
are different from the ones crunching data in today’s computers. But
Intel is trying to adapt the workhorse of existing computers, the
silicon transistor, for the task.
Intel has a team of quantum
hardware engineers in Portland, Oregon, who collaborate with researchers
in the Netherlands, at TU Delft’s QuTech quantum research institute,
under a $50 million grant established last year. Earlier this month
Intel’s group reported that they can now layer the ultra-pure silicon
needed for a quantum computer onto the standard wafers used in chip
factories.
This strategy makes Intel an outlier among industry and
academic groups working on qubits, as the basic components needed for
quantum computers are known. Other companies can run code on prototype
chips with several qubits made from superconducting circuits (see “Google’s Quantum Dream Machine”). No one has yet advanced silicon qubits that far.
A
quantum computer would need to have thousands or millions of qubits to
be broadly useful, though. And Jim Clarke, who leads Intel’s project as
director of quantum hardware, argues that silicon qubits are more likely
to get to that point (although Intel is also doing some research on
superconducting qubits). One thing in silicon’s favor, he says: the
expertise and equipment used to make conventional chips with billions of
identical transistors should allow work on perfecting and scaling up
silicon qubits to progress quickly.
Intel’s silicon qubits
represent data in a quantum property called the “spin” of a single
electron trapped inside a modified version of the transistors in its
existing commercial chips. “The hope is that if we make the best
transistors, then with a few material and design changes we can make the
best qubits,” says Clarke.
Another reason to work on silicon
qubits is that they should be more reliable than the superconducting
equivalents. Still, all qubits are error prone because they work on data
using very weak quantum effects (see “Google Researchers Make Quantum Components More Reliable”).
The
new process that helps Intel experiment with silicon qubits on standard
chip wafers, developed with the materials companies Urenco and Air
Liquide, should help speed up its research, says Andrew Dzurak,
who works on silicon qubits at the University of New South Wales in
Australia. “To get to hundreds of thousands of qubits, we will need
incredible engineering reliability, and that is the hallmark of the
semiconductor industry,” he says.
Companies developing
superconducting qubits also make them using existing chip fabrication
methods. But the resulting devices are larger than transistors, and
there is no template for how to manufacture and package them up in large
numbers, says Dzurak.
Chad Rigetti, founder and CEO of Rigetti Computing, a startup working on superconducting qubits
similar to those Google and IBM are developing, agrees that this
presents a challenge. But he argues that his chosen technology’s head
start will afford ample time and resources to tackle the problem.
Google
and Rigetti have both said that in just a few years they could build a
quantum chip with tens or hundreds of qubits that dramatically
outperforms conventional computers on certain problems, even doing
useful work on problems in chemistry or machine learning.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603165/intel-bets-it-can-turn-everyday-silicon-into-quantum-computings-wonder-material/?utm_campaign=internal&utm_medium=homepage&utm_source=top-stories_1
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