Silicon is not one of the leading modalities for quantum computers, but it has progressed a lot in the past ~2-3 years. Here are a few key advancements that have happened as of late:
The engineering at those scales is pretty magical isn't it! Getting a whole bunch of individual atoms exactly where they want them.
I wonder what the success rate is - i.e. how many do they build to get one working.
Usually they randomly shoot atoms at the substrate and then just search for a spot (among thousands) where it randomly has the configuration they want. Still pretty amazing.
This is a PR release meant to accompany the scientific work shown in the actual source / link. I don’t mean to be argumentative, just, would have taken back the time I spent reading it after reading the Nature version. It’s just “go read Nature” + 3 bullet points + anodyne CXO quotes.
What are the real world use cases now, today? The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn't a real world application.
Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU card?
That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very very bearish.
- Intel can now do 2D which means a Surface code can be run on these devices: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14918
- HRL can now do 2D as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08861
- They are solving the wiring problem: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01491-3
- Their interconnects are high fidelity: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09827-w
I have not seen any progress or breakthroughs in the QC field at all that are significant.
If the only goal for QC is to try to run Shor's algorithm or to "try to break the bitcoin blockchain" then it is worse than useless.
What are the real world use cases now, today? The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn't a real world application.
Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU card?
That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very very bearish.