INDUSTRY NEWS

Connect the dots

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is this: Develop a process for manufacturing semiconductors based on quantum physics that offers reliability, repeatability, and high yields. And, oh, make it so that it operates at room temperature.

They don't have Lalo Schifrin's driving theme music to back them, but a team of researchers from several universities does have $1.6 million in backing from the National Science Foundation to take on that challenge. The project's goal is to develop a production-ready process that will work with any of the several quantum-computing-architecture proposals now available, says Paul Berger, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Ohio State University.

The project leader has demonstrated that quantum-dot nanoswitches—such as his resonant tunneling diodes or a colleague's single-electron transistors—can work. It's just that the chipmaking process is woefully inadequate. In fact, it's so bad that one project from a leading researcher showed only two or three quantum dots working at room temperature—out of 30 to 40 tries at making the device. The dots can be made by hand with a scanning tunneling microscope, but even the most advanced current lithographic methods, including e-beam, are at least 10 times too large. Room-temperature operation requires a dot smaller than 4 nm, Berger notes, lamenting the fact that even e-beam lithography lacks the throughput needed for making the devices anything more than an impossible mission, so far.

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