Communications of the ACM
New Chip Architecture May Provide Foundation for Quantum Computer
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a device that they say could help increase qubit densities.
Credit: D. Youngner/Honeywell
Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) researchers have demonstrated a device that enables more electrodes to be placed on a chip, a breakthrough they say could help increase qubit densities and bring the field one step closer to a quantum computer that can perform complex algorithms.
Qubits, which exploit a quantum property called superposition, can be correlated with each other in a way that classical bits cannot, allowing for a new kind of massively parallel computation, but only if many qubits at a time can be produced and controlled. The challenge is scaling the technology up into a useful device.
One promising qubit candidate is individual ions trapped inside a vacuum chamber and manipulated with lasers. However, the scalability of modern trap architectures is limited because the connections for the electrodes needed to generate the trapping fields come at the edge of the chip, which means their number is limited by the chip perimeter.
The Georgia Tech approach uses new microfabrication techniques that allow more electrodes to fit onto the chip while preserving the laser access required. The researchers also freed up more chip space by replacing area-intensive surface or edge capacitors with trench capacitors and strategically moving wire connections.
From Georgia Tech News Center
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