[ExI] Moore's Law

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Thu Mar 21 19:46:45 UTC 2013


On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:


> > The progress in hardware has recently been limited, especially since
> Moore has ended.
>

Maybe, but there have been bumps in the road before and Moore's law has
always recovered. In 1990 it looked like the end of the road due to heat
and power consumption, but then the switch was made from bipolar technology
to CMOS and the law continued. Then in 2000 it looked like the end because
of quantum tunneling leakage current through the silicon dioxide used in
the very narrow transistor gates, so they switched over to high dielectric
constant materials like hafnium silicate and the problem was solved.

Maybe its different this time and it really is the end, or maybe monolithic
3D technology will save the day. Or Spintronics, devices that for the first
time make use of the fact that electrons not only have an electrical charge
but the particles also have a spin. Or maybe memristors, the fourth passive
2 terminal electrical component after resistors, capacitors and inductors.
Or maybe it will be Quantum Computers.

 By the way, most of the March 8 2013 issue of Science Magazine (it and
Nature are the 2 most respected science journals in the world) is devoted
almost entirely to articles about Quantum Computers. Here are what some of
the world class physicists have to say:

"The concept of solving problems with the use of quantum algorithms,
introduced in the early 1990s was welcomed as a revolutionary change in the
theory of computational complexity, but the feat of actually building a
quantum computer was then thought to be impossible. The invention of
quantum error correction introduced hope that a quantum computer might one
day be built, most likely by future generations of physicists and
engineers. However, less than 20 years later, we have witnessed so many
advances that successful quantum computations, and other applications of
quantum information processing such as quantum simulation and long distance
quantum communication appear reachable within our lifetime"

"A final measurement of the system can then yield information pertaining to
all 2^N states. For merely N= 400 qubits, we find that the encoded
information of 2^ 400 = 10^120 values is more than the number of
fundamental particles in the universe; such a computation could never be
performed without the parallel processing enabled by quantum mechanics. In
a sense, entanglement between qubits acts as an invisible wiring that can
potentially be exploited to solve certain problems that are intractable
otherwise. [...] Remarkably, we have not yet encountered any fundamental
physical principles that would prohibit the building of quite large quantum
processors."

"The past decade has seen remarkable progress in isolating and controlling
quantum coherence using charges and spins in semiconductors. Quantum
control has been established at room temperature, and electron spin
coherence times now exceed several seconds, a nine order-of-magnitude
increase in coherence compared with the first semiconductor qubits."

"Although many challenges remain on the road to constructing a useful
quantum computer, the pace of discovery seems to be accelerating, and spins
in semiconductors are poised to play a major role."

There was even a article on the most radical sort of Quantum computer, a
Topological Quantum Computer using non-Abelian pseudo-particles, and even
here they report "substantial progress in this field".

  John K Clark
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