The era of quantum CMOS has started

“The qubit systems we have today are a tremendous scientific achievement, but they take us no closer to having a quantum computer that can solve a problem that anybody cares about. It’s akin to trying to make today’s best smartphones using vacuum tubes from the early 1900s. You can put 100 tubes together and establish the principle that if you could somehow get 10 billion of them to work together in a coherent, seamless manner, you could achieve all kinds of miracles,” Sankar Das Sarma recently wrote in MIT Review.

What’s missing, the University of Maryland physicist continued, is a believable method of scaling. Just as modern electronics evolved from transistors to CPUs, quantum computing needs to take the number of qubits from handfuls to millions or even billions. Das Sarma asserts that this challenge tends to be underestimated, but a US-Dutch research team recently shared progress in building a scalable quantum computer. Another team from France presented a strategy to deliver a million qubits by 2024.