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LEARN MORE Microprocessor Microarchitecture CPU Quiz How Quantum Computers Work The massive amount of processing power generated by computer manufacturers  has not yet been able to quench our thirst for speed and computing capacity. In 1947, American computer engineer  Howard Aiken said that just six electronic digital  computers  would satisfy the computing needs of the United States. Others have made similar errant predictions about the amount of computing power that would support our growing technological needs. Of course, Aiken didn't count on the large amounts of data generated by scientific research, the proliferation of  personal computers  or the emergence of the  Internet , which have only fueled our need for more, more and more computing power. Will we ever have the amount of computing power we need or want? If, as Moore's Law  states, the number of transistors on a  microprocessor  continues to...

Introduction to the D-Wave Quantum Hardware How D-Wave processors are built, and how they use the physics of spin systems to implement quantum computation Contents SECTION 1: Inside the processor 1.1 - The building blocks of QC 1.2 - A fabric of programmable elements 1.3 - Support circuitry: Addressing, programming and reading the qubits 1.4 - Manufacturing quantum processors SECTION 2: Outside the processor 2.1 - The processor packaging 2.2 - Computer cooling 2.3 - Computer shielding and wiring 2.4 - Computer form factor 2.5 - Cloud based access SECTION 3 3.1 - The future of the hardware The aim of this document is to describe how a quantum computer is physically built, how quantum bits and their associated circuitry are created, addressed, and controlled, and what is happening inside the computer when programmers send information to a D-Wave quantum machine. The material here is written using very high level concepts and is designed t...

Will Silicon Save Quantum Computing? Silicon has become a leading contender in the hunt for a practical, scalable quantum bit Illustration: Bryan Christie Design Grand engineering challenges often require  an epic level of patience. That’s certainly true for quantum computing. For a good 20 years now, we’ve known that quantum computers could, in principle, be staggeringly powerful, taking just a few minutes to work out problems that would take an ordinary computer longer than the age of the universe to solve. But the effort to build such machines has barely crossed the starting line. In fact, we’re still trying to identify the best materials for the job. Today, the leading contenders are all quite exotic: There are superconducting circuits printed from materials such as aluminum and cooled to one-hundredth of a degree above absolute zero, floating ions that are made to hover above chips and are interrogated with lasers, and atoms such as nitrogen trapped in diamond matri...

New material for quantum computing discovered out of the blue A common blue pigment could have an important role to play in the development of a quantum computer, according to a paper published today in the journal  Nature . The pigment, copper phthalocyanine (CuPc), which is similar to light harvesting section of the chlorophyll molecule, is a low-cost organic semiconductor that is found in many household products, including the £5 note. Now, researchers from the London Centre for Nanotechnology at UCL and Imperial College and the University of British Columbia have shown that the electrons in CuPc can remain in ‘superposition’ – an intrinsically quantum effect where the electron exists in two states at once - for surprisingly long times, showing this simple dye molecule has potential as a medium for quantum technologies. Crucially, CuPc can be processed into a thin film that can be readily used for device fabrication, a significant advantage over similar materials th...