Author's Latest Posts


What Will That DSA Template Do, Anyway?


As directed self assembly techniques make the transition from line and space test patterns to the more complex structures seen in real devices, modeling is emerging as a significant issue. How will the co-polymers behave in the presence of a particular template pattern? While several laboratory-scale modeling methods exist, most are too computationally expensive to be used for large area str... » read more

How To Program A Quantum Computer


Quantum computers have captured the attention of the computer science world because they are faster than classical computers for some problems. Spend any time reading about quantum computing technology, and you’ll see that statement over and over again. But what does it actually mean, given that classical computing is a mature, highly optimized technology and quantum computers are in their in... » read more

Watching Qubits At Work


As previously discussed, part of the appeal of qubits based on nitrogen-vacancy (N-V) defect centers in diamond is the ability to manipulate them with light. Light pulses can be used both to initialize the qubit array and to measure the results of quantum computations. As recent work at The University of Chicago shows, light can also be used to study the evolution of the quantum state in the... » read more

Reading About Quantum Computing


For the last several months, I’ve been working on a series of articles about quantum computing: how quantum computers are different from conventional computers, what materials systems might be appropriate for use in qubits, and, for the upcoming last article, how one might actually build and program a quantum computer. Some of the subtopics are familiar ground for me, and probably for most... » read more

EUV Is Key To 450mm Wafers


Whether the wafers in question are 200 mm in diameter, or 300 mm, or potentially 450 mm, larger wafer sizes have always been justified by manufacturing economics. If the cost to process a wafer stays the same, but the wafer contains more devices, then the cost per device goes down. For processes that apply to the entire wafer at once — etch, deposition, cleaning, and so forth — the equation... » read more

What Is A Technology Node, Anyway?


The idea of clearly defined “technology nodes” has been more theoretical than practical for quite some time now. Electrostatic and power consumption considerations have long made it difficult to scale transistor dimensions at the same rate as memory density. Meanwhile, lithography has become more and more challenging, particularly for the arbitrary patterns commonly seen in logic design. ... » read more

Not All Qubits Are Small


While diamond nitrogen-vacancy centers offer one attractive implementation of quantum qubits, many other systems have been proposed. In theory, at least, any system with clearly identifiable quantum states can serve the purpose. The challenge lies in finding a system in which those states can be manipulated and measured by external forces and can be fabricated in large enough numbers for practi... » read more

More To Quantum Computing Than Qubits


A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article about qubits based on the nitrogen-vacancy (N-V) center in diamond. I’m working on one about qubits based on superconducting loops with Josephson junctions. But it’s important to remember that the qubit technology alone tells only part of the story of a quantum computer. Quantum computers, like conventional computers, need ways to store data and wa... » read more

Engineering For Next-Gen Memory Performance


When only a few electrons mean the difference between the ON and the OFF state, it’s difficult to manufacture [getkc id="22" kc_name="memory"] elements with consistent, reliable performance. This is the situation conventional capacitance-based memories face as critical dimensions drop to just a few nanometers. As a result, device designers are considering a wide range of alternative memory... » read more

How To Make A Qubit


As discussed in Part 1 of this series, quantum information processing may offer elegant solutions to a number of important problems in computation. Actually building a quantum computer, however, is not so easy. Part 1 used an isolated hydrogen molecule as a model two-qubit system. Molecular orbitals are simple to explain and readily monitored by well-established techniques. A viable qubit te... » read more

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