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OYSTER BAY, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The year 2020 will be an exciting one for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chipset market. In 2020 alone, more than 1.4 million cloud AI chipsets and 330 million edge AI chipsets are forecasted to be shipped, generating a total revenue of US$9 billion, states global tech market advisory firm, ABI Research.

In its new whitepaper, 54 Technology Trends to Watch in 2020, ABI Researchs analysts have identified 35 trends that will shape the technology landscape and 19 others that, although attracting huge amounts of speculation and commentary, look less likely to move the needle over the next twelve months. After a tumultuous 2019 that was beset by many challenges, both integral to technology markets and derived from global market dynamics, 2020 looks set to be equally challenging, says Stuart Carlaw, Chief Research Officer at ABI Research.

What will happen in 2020:

More custom AI chipsets will be launched:Weve already seen the launch of new custom AI chipsets by both major vendors and new startups alike. From Cerebras Systems worlds largest chipset to Alibabas custom cloud AI inference chipset, the AI chipset industry has been hugely impacted by the desire to reduce energy consumption, achieve higher performance, and, in the case of China, minimize the influence of Western suppliers in their supply chain, says Lian Jye Su, AI & Machine Learning Principal Analyst at ABI Research. 2020 will be an exciting year for AI chipsets. Several stealth startups are likely to launch programmable chipsets for data centers, while the emergence of new AI applications in edge devices will give rise to more Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) dedicated for edge AI inference workloads.

Heterogeneous computing will emerge as the key to supporting future AI Networks:Existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications and networks are currently serviced by different processing architectures, either that be Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), CPUs, Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), or hardware accelerators, each used to its strength depending on the use case addressed. However, the next generation and AI and Machine Learning (ML) frameworks will be multimodal by their nature and may require heterogeneous computing resources for their operations. The leading players, including Intel, NVIDIA, Xilinx, and Qualcomm will introduce new chipset types topped by hardware accelerators to address the new use cases, says Su. Vendors of these chips will move away from offering proprietary software stacks and will start to adopt open Software Development Kits (SDKs) and Application Programming Interface (API) approaches to their tools in order to simplify the technology complexity for their developers and help them focus on building efficient algorithms for the new AI and ML applications.

What wont happen in 2020:

Quantum computing:Despite claims from Google in achieving quantum supremacy, the tech industry is still far away from the democratization of quantum computing technology, Su says. Existing vendors, such as IBM and D-Wave, will continue to enhance its existing quantum computing systems, but the developer community remains small and the benefits brought by these systems will still be limited to selected industries, such as military, national laboratories, and aerospace agencies. Like other nascent processing technologies, such as photonic and neuromorphic chipset, quantum computing systems in their current form still require very stringent operating environment, a lot of maintenance, and custom adjustment, and are definitely not even remotely ready for large-scale commercial deployments, Su concludes.

For more trends that wont happen in 2020, and the 35 trends that will, download the 54 Technology Trends to Watch in 2020 whitepaper.

About ABI Research

ABI Research provides strategic guidance to visionaries, delivering actionable intelligence on the transformative technologies that are dramatically reshaping industries, economies, and workforces across the world. ABI Researchs global team of analysts publish groundbreaking studies often years ahead of other technology advisory firms, empowering our clients to stay ahead of their markets and their competitors.

For more information about ABI Researchs services, contact us at +1.516.624.2500 in the Americas, +44.203.326.0140 in Europe, +65.6592.0290 in Asia-Pacific or visit http://www.abiresearch.com.

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2020 Will be a Banner Year for AI Custom Chipsets and Heterogenous Computing; Quantum Computing Remains on the Far Horizon - Business Wire

The decade thats knocking on our doors now the 2020s is likely to be a time when science fiction manifests itself in our homes and roads and skies as viable, everyday technologies. Cars that can drive themselves. Meat that is derived from plants. Robots that can be fantastic companions both in bed and outside.

Implanting kidneys that can be 3-D printed using your own biomaterial. Using gene editing to eradicate diseases, increase crop yield or fix genetic disorders in human beings. Inserting a swarm of nanobots that can cruise through your blood stream and monitor parameters or unblock arteries. Zipping between Delhi and New York on a hypersonic jet. All of this is likely to become possible or substantially closer to becoming a reality in the next 10 years.

Ideas that have been the staple of science fiction for decades artificial intelligence, universal translators, sex robots, autonomous cars, gene editing and quantum computing are at the cusp of maturity now. Many are ready to move out of labs and enter the mainstream. Expect the next decade to witness breakout years for the world of technology.

Read on:

The 2020s: A new decade promising miraculous tech innovations

Universal translators: End of language barrier

Climate interventions: Clearing the air from carbon

Personalised learning: Pedagogy gets a reboot with AI

Made in a Printer: 3-D printing going to be a new reality

Digital money: End of cash is near, cashless currencies are in vogue

Singularity: An era where machines will out-think human

Mach militaries: Redefining warfare in the 2020

5G & Beyond: Ushering a truly connected world

Technology: Solving the problem of clean water

Quantum computing : Beyond the power of classical computing

Nanotechnology: From science fiction to reality

Power Saver: Energy-storage may be the key to maximise power generation

Secret code: Gene editing could prove to be a game-changer

Love in the time of Robots: The rise of sexbots and artificial human beings

Wheels of the future: Flying cars, hyperloops and e-highways will transform how people travel

New skies, old fears: The good, bad& ugly of drones

Artificial creativity: Computer programs could soon churn out books, movies and music

Meat alternatives: Alternative meat market is expected to grow 10 times by 2029

Intelligent robots & cyborg warriors will lead the charge in battle

Why we first need to focus on the ethical challenges of artificial intelligence

It's time to reflect honestly on our motivations for innovation

India's vital role in new space age

Plastic waste: Environment-friendly packaging technologies will gain traction

Read more:

20 technologies that could change your life in the next decade - Economic Times

The early 2000s were not a good time for technology. After entering the new millennium amid the impotent panic of the Y2K bug, it wasnt long before the Dotcom Bubble was bursting all the hopes of a new internet-based era.

Fortunately the recovery was swift and within a few years brand new technologies were emerging that would transform culture, politicsand the economy.

They have brought with them new ways of connecting, consuming and getting around, while also raising fresh Doomsday concerns. As we enter a new decade of the 21st Century, weve rounded up the best and worst of the technologies that have taken us here, while offering some clue of where we might be going.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

There was nothing much really new about the iPhone: there had been phones before, there had been computers before, there had been phones combined into computers before. There was also a lot that wasnt good about it: it was slow, its internet connection barely functioned, and it would be two years before it could even take a video.

But as the foremost smartphone it heralded a revolution in the way people communicate, listen, watch and create. There has been no aspect of life that hasnt been changed by the technologies bundled up in the iPhone an ever-present and always-on internet connection, a camera that never leaves your side, a computer with mighty processing power that can be plucked out of your pocket.

Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone on 9 January, 2007 (Reuters)

The 2000s have, so far, been the era of mobile computers and social networking changing the shape of our cultural, political and social climate. All of those huge changes, for better or worse, are bound up in that tiny phone.AG

Though few people noticed, online social networks actually began at the end of the last century. The first was Six Degrees in 1997, which was named after the theory that everyone on the planet is separated by only six other people. It included features that became popular with subsequent iterations of the form, including profiles and friend lists, but it never really took off.

It wasnt until Friends Reunited and MySpace in the early 2000s that social networks achieved mainstream success, though even these seem insignificant when compared to Facebook.

Not only did Mark Zuckerbergs creation muscle its way to a monopoly in terms of social networks, it also swallowed up any nascent competitors in a space that came to be known as social media. First there was Instagram in 2012, for a modest $1 billion, and then came WhatsApp in 2014 for $19bn.

Between all of its apps, Facebook now reaches more than 2 billion people every day. It has come to define the way we communicate and heralded a new era of hyper-connectedness, while also profoundly shaping the internet as we know it. In doing so, Facebook has not only consigned the site Six Degrees to the history books, it has also re-written the theory itself cutting it down to just three-and-a-half degrees of separation. AC

At the start of this century, the complete reinvention of the entire economic system wasnt something many people were talking about. But then the 2007-08 financial crisis happened. As mortgages defaulted, companies collapsed, and governments bailed out the banks to the tune of trillions of dollars, people began to wonder if there might be a better way.

One person or group believed they had the answer. Satoshi Nakamotos true identity may still be a mystery, but their creation of a new electronic cash system called bitcoin in 2009 could have implications far beyond just currency. The underlying blockchain technology an immutable and unhackable online ledger could potentially transform everything from healthcare to real estate.

Bitcoin is yet to take off as a mainstream form of payment or transform the global economy like it might have promised, but we are barely a decade into the great cryptocurrency experiment. It has inspired thousands of imitators, including those currently being developed by Facebook and China, and it may be another 10 years before its true potential is finally realised. AC

Alright, so here we are, in front of the, er, elephants. And the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And thats cool.

It may have been an inauspicious start, but these words would go on to fundamentally transform the way people consume media in the 21st century. It was 23 April, 2005, and Jawed Karim had just uploaded the first ever video to YouTube a video-sharing website he had helped create.

The YouTube channel homepage for Indian record label T-Series, which overtook controversial Swedish vlogger PewDiePie in 2019

AFP/Getty

PewDiePie has been the most popular YouTuber since 2013

PewDiePie / YouTube

5-Minute Crafts, which offers quick and quirky DIY tips to viewers, didn't even feature in the top 15 YouTube channels in July 2018

5-Minute Crafts

Brazilian music video producer and director KondZilla began his career after buying a camera with life insurance money left to him after his mother died when he was 18

Getty

Sony Entertainment Televesion (SET) launched in 1995 and has recently seen huge growth of its Hindi-language YouTube channel

AFP/Getty

Canadian musician Justin Bieber held the number-two spot in 2018 before T-Series took over

Getty

World Wrestling Entertainment has managed to gain a huge following on YouTube by sharing clips of fights and interviews with its stars

WWE

This YouTube channel specialises in 3D animation videos of nursery rhymes, as well as its own original songs. It is owned by the American firm Treasure Studio

Cocomelon

YouTube personalities Coby Cotton, Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, and Cory Cotton form Dude Perfect, a sports entertainment channel from the US

Getty

YouTube personality German Garmendia is a Chilean comedian and writer

HolaSoyGerman

One of several musicians that populate the top 15 most popular YouTube channels, Ed Sheeran joined the list in 2017

Getty

Music channel Badabun's subscriber count has not been publicly visible since 6 March 2019, at which point it had 37.2 million subscribers

Badabun / YouTube

US rapper Eminem first entered the list of the top 15 YouTube channels in 2013, the same year that PewDiePie took over

AFP/Getty

Brazilian Whindersson Nunes Batista joined YouTube in 2013 and became popular for his comedy videos

Whinderssonnunes / YouTube

US singer and actress Ariana Grande is the latest addition to the top 15 YouTube channels

AFP/Getty

The YouTube channel homepage for Indian record label T-Series, which overtook controversial Swedish vlogger PewDiePie in 2019

AFP/Getty

PewDiePie has been the most popular YouTuber since 2013

PewDiePie / YouTube

5-Minute Crafts, which offers quick and quirky DIY tips to viewers, didn't even feature in the top 15 YouTube channels in July 2018

5-Minute Crafts

Brazilian music video producer and director KondZilla began his career after buying a camera with life insurance money left to him after his mother died when he was 18

Getty

Sony Entertainment Televesion (SET) launched in 1995 and has recently seen huge growth of its Hindi-language YouTube channel

AFP/Getty

Canadian musician Justin Bieber held the number-two spot in 2018 before T-Series took over

Getty

World Wrestling Entertainment has managed to gain a huge following on YouTube by sharing clips of fights and interviews with its stars

WWE

This YouTube channel specialises in 3D animation videos of nursery rhymes, as well as its own original songs. It is owned by the American firm Treasure Studio

Cocomelon

YouTube personalities Coby Cotton, Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, and Cory Cotton form Dude Perfect, a sports entertainment channel from the US

Getty

YouTube personality German Garmendia is a Chilean comedian and writer

HolaSoyGerman

One of several musicians that populate the top 15 most popular YouTube channels, Ed Sheeran joined the list in 2017

Getty

Music channel Badabun's subscriber count has not been publicly visible since 6 March 2019, at which point it had 37.2 million subscribers

Badabun / YouTube

US rapper Eminem first entered the list of the top 15 YouTube channels in 2013, the same year that PewDiePie took over

AFP/Getty

Brazilian Whindersson Nunes Batista joined YouTube in 2013 and became popular for his comedy videos

Whinderssonnunes / YouTube

US singer and actress Ariana Grande is the latest addition to the top 15 YouTube channels

AFP/Getty

Just over a year later, Google bought the site for $1.65 billion and the fortunes of Karim, his co-founders, and countless future content creators were changed forever.

There are now hundreds of hours of video published to YouTube every minute and it all started with that 18-second clip at the zoo. AC

Arthur C Clarke famously quipped that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But there is surely nothing more like magic and no magic more powerful than the fact that the 21st century has brought the ability to instantly connect to information and people at the other side of the world.

First, at the beginning of the century, came 3G, and then 10 years or so later came 4G. Every decade of this century has been marked by new advances in the speed and reliability of mobile data connections.

And those mobile data connections have helped re-write the world that relies on them. Just about every other major breakthrough in technology that came through the 2000s social media, instant photo sharing, citizen journalism and everything else relied on having data connections everywhere.

5G which has ostensibly already rolled out, but is yet to make its full impact is likely to be similarly transformative through the decade to come, if its evangelists are to be believed.

Debates have raged about whether this constant connectivity and the distractions and dangers it has brought has really driven us apart. But that too is surely testament to its power. AG

Many of technologys biggest developments in the 2000s havent really been about technology at all: piracy and then streaming changed how we make and consume culture entirely, social media has turned politics on his head. Nowhere is that more clear than in the gig economy and the apps and websites like Uber, Deliveroo and Airbnb that power it, which claim to be tech businesses but are really new ways of buying and selling labour.

The real revolution of the gig economy was not the technology that powers these apps: there is little difference between calling for a cab and summoning an Uber, really. Nor was it what the companies like to suggest, that they have opened up a new and inspiring way of working that allows anyone to clock on whenever they log on.

Instead, it was the beginning of a process of changing the way that people work and relate to those who fulfil services for them. It is likely that we have not seen the end of the kinds of profound changes that these companies have made to working conditions or the ways that those workers have fought back. AG

Virtual reality has been the future before: ever since the first stereoscopes, people have been excited about the possibility of disappearing into other worlds that appear before their eyes. But it has never quite arrived.

But in the more recent years of the 2000s it started to look a bit more meaningful. Virtual reality headsets have been pushed out by many of the worlds biggest companies, and consumer computers are finally powerful enough to generate believable worlds that people are happy to spend their time in.

In recent years, much of the focus has turned to augmented reality rather than virtual reality. That technology allows information to be overlaid on top of the real world, rather than putting people into an entirely virtual world. If it comes off if it is not confined to failed experiments like Google Glass then it could change the way we interact with the world, potentially giving us information all of the time and could even do away with things like smartphones as our primary way of connecting with technology. AG

Quantum computing has not really happened yet. A few months ago, researchers announced that they had achieved quantum supremacy by doing an operation that would not be possible on a traditional computer but it was a largely useless, very specific, operation, which didnt really change anything in itself.

Already, however, the promise and the threat of quantum computing is changing the world. It looks set to upend all of our assumptions about computers, allowing them to be unimaginably fast and do work never thought possible. It could unlock new kinds of health research and scientific understanding; it could also literally unlock encryption, which currently relies on impossible calculations that could quickly become very possible with quantum computers.

A new era of computing could bring about a 'quantum apocalypse' (iStock)

It isnt clear when it will arrive, of course; like other potentially revolutionary technologies, it could take a very long time or never arrive at all. But it is sitting there in the future, ready to turn everything on its head and, as researchers rush to understand it, it is already changing the world. AG

No vision of the future would be complete without the ability to speak to and control your home. And now it seems like we are finally living in it.

Through the 2000s, just about everything came to be hooked up to the internet: you could buy smart kettles, internet-enabled doorbells, and a video camera for every room in your house. And to control them came microphones and speakers that you put in your house and could talk to.

But as the smart home and the voice assistants that power it have soared in popularity, they have been beset by concerns, too. Is giving over control of your home to internet-enabled devices safe, when those devices can break down or be seized by hackers? Should we be allowing internet giants like Amazon and Google to put microphones in our home? As we enter the new decade, it looks like our homes are set to be defined not by the capabilities the technology in our homes give us but who we want to have power over them. AG

Before there was Spotify, there was Napster, and before people were watching movies on Netflix, they were downloading them through PirateBay. Piracy has been one step ahead of legal ways to consume media but in doing so it has led the way for new platforms that now dominate our online lives.

Streaming has not only changed the way we listen to music and watch films, it has also given rise to new ways to create content. Live streaming video games on Twitch is one of the fastest growing mediums, while live video broadcasts through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube give people instant access to everything from street protests to rocket launches.

The Pirate Bay's latest venture into streaming comes despite battling takedown attempts by authorities for more than a decade (Reuters)

More:

The 20 technologies that defined the first 20 years of the 21st Century - The Independent

Facial reconstruction of A. anamensis by John Gurche using 38-lakh-year-old (3.8-million-year-ago) hominin cranium.

From discovering cures for life-threatening diseases to exploring outer space, from unearthing new facts about human history to making incredible strides in artificial intelligence, humanity achieved exceptional breakthroughs in the field of science and technology in 2019.

As the year comes to an end, it is time to look back at some of those glorious scientific revolutions that will shape our future. Here are our picks for the most significant scientific advancements of 2019:

5. Hello Sun? Earthlings are going beyond your influence!

A simulated landing process of Chang'e-4 lunar probe at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center on Jan. 3, 2019.

Launched in January 2006, the interplanetary space probe New Horizons from the US space agency NASA steered past the Kuiper Belt object 486958 Arrokoth (then nicknamed Ultima Thule) on January 1, 2019. The Kuiper Belt is the region beyond the known planetary system of solar system, and this was the farthest flyby ever conducted by any human-made spacecraft.

Also this year, on November 4, NASA's Voyager 2 reached the interstellar mediuma space between star systems, well beyond the influence of our solar system. Voyager 1 had earlier achieved this feat in 2012. Voyager 2, its successor, was launched in the year 1977.

Also, China's moon mission, Chang'e 4, successfully made a soft landing on the far side of the Moonbecoming the first ever mission to do so. Named after the Chinese moon goddess, the mission is attempting to determine the age and composition of the Moon's unexplored region.

4. Quantum leap in computing

Representational image

Of all the progress made in computing research in 2019, the biggest breakthrough was perhaps the realisation of quantum computing.

Right in the first month of 2019, technology giant IBM unveiled Q System Onethe first quantum computer outside a research labbringing a rather abstract concept into the public imagination. Unlike the bits of information in computers we use, a quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits, enabling an exponential rise in the amount of data it can process and store.

Also Read: Rewind 2019: A Look Back at Significant Developments in Indian Science This Year

Further, a team of researchers from Australia and Singapore developed a quantum-powered machine that can accurately simulate future outcomes arising from different set of alternatives. Meanwhile, another study at Yale University showed that we can catch a qubit between the quantum jump and alter its outcomes. This was an exponential jump in fine-tuning the quantum systems as the outcomes need not be completely random and abrupt.

While other research also helped in conceptualising quantum drives with immense storage capacity, the biggest news was from Google. The search giant confirmed in October that it had achieved quantum supremacy. To put things in perspective, researchers at Google claim that the quantum computer solved in three minutes a problem that would have taken 10,000 years even for a supercomputer.

3. Revolutionary research in medical science

Representational image

Medical researchers are always striving to push the envelope of human resilience and efficiency. The year 2019 saw progress on both these fronts, with the development of potential cures for multiple life-threatening diseases and gene-editing promising to be more effective than ever.

This year, twin drugs were developed for Ebola and were found to be effective in nearly 90% of the cases, making the seemingly incurable condition treatable. Researchers also discovered potential cures for bubble boy disease, a condition where babies are born without disease-fighting immune cells, for cystic fibrosis, a painful, debilitating lung disease, as well as for pancreatic cancer.

Moreover, after decades, HIV research finally yielded some fruitful results this year with patients positively responding to treatments. After a long gap of 12 years from the day the first patient was cured of HIV infection that causes AIDS, another patient was cured in March 2019. Researchers had been relentlessly trying to replicate the treatment that cured the infection for the first time in 2007.

Furthermore, using CRISPR gene-editing technology, scientists have found potential treatments for cancer patients, even those with whom the standard procedure was not successful. In October, researchers produced scientific evidence that new gene-editing technology has the potential to correct up to 89% of genetic defects like sickle cell anaemia.

2. Imaging the faraway invisible wonder

Image of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87

Named the top scientific breakthrough of 2019 by the journal Science, this incredible photograph of a black hole was taken using eight radio telescopes around the world to form a virtual instrument that is said to be the size of the Earth itself.

The first-ever image of a black hole, released on April 10 this year, was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration team. The gravity of a black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape its pull, and to capture an image of something that does not emit light is no easy task.

EHT imaged the silhouette (or shadow) of a massive black hole called M87 which is located at the centre of a galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth. M87 has enormous masswhopping 6500 million times the mass of the Sun. The image shows a ring of light coming from the gas falling into the event horizon (the boundary from beyond which nothing can escape) of the black hole.

1. Retracing the origins of humans

Craniofacial reconstruction process of Rakhigarhi cemetery individuals (BR02 and BR36).

Humankinds fascination with the question 'Where did we come from?' has persisted over centuries. Yet, some of the biggest breakthroughs in answering this question were made this year, starting with the discovery of a previously-unknown species of ancient humans. Named Homo luzonensis, this small-bodied bipedal species was discovered in the Philippines and is said to have lived on the island of Luzon 50,000 to 67,000 years ago.

In May, researchers deciphered a four-decade old mystery by identifying a 160,000-year-old human jawbone found in the Tibetian Plateau nearly 40 years ago. The fossil was of Denisovan, an enigmatic ancestor species of humans who ranged across Asia until some 50,000 years ago. The discoverymade despite the absence of DNA in the jawhelped scientists understand this species better. In September, another group of researchers further refined the picture of Denisovans whose traces still linger in the DNA of a few modern humans.

In August, descriptions of a nearly 38-lakh-year-old remains of a skull belonging to a bipedal ancestor of humans baffled the world. This skull proved that two of our ancestor speciesA. anamensis and A. afarensismay have overlapped for at least 100,000 years. This evidence of the existence of these two of our ancestor species at a similar timescale busts the long-held belief that human evolution follows a single lineage, i.e. one species coming after the other.

In a first-of-its-kind attempt, scientists have generated an accurate facial representation of people from the Indus Valley Civilisation in October. Nnother important study showed that the ancestral homeland of every human alive today traces back to a region south of the Zambezi River in northern Botswana. Building on the previous genetic evolution studies, the researchers used ethnolinguistic and geographic frequency distribution data from the genomes of over 1000 southern Africans to trace back the origin of modern humans.

Exponential growth continues

India has also contributed immensely in all scientific domains over the past few years and is now only behind China and the US in terms of the number of published research studies. Building exponentially on the success of previous decades, scientists around the world have made immense contributions from improving our daily life to understanding the mysteries of the universe.

With so much exciting research pouring in from all corners of the world, it isn't easy to even keep track of the incredible pace at which science is progressing. While we have tried to cover a few iconic annual scientific highlights in this article, there are thousands of other important discoveries, studies and achievements that shaped science in 2019.

And as yet another potential-filled year dawns on our planet, The Weather Channel India will keep you tuned in about all the exciting news, updates and breakthroughs from the world of science.

So for your daily dose of weather, environment, space and science stories, stay tuned to weather.com and stay curious!

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Top 5: Scientific Breakthroughs That Made 2019 an Unforgettable Year of Human Progress - The Weather Channel

Researchers at Princeton University have made an important step forward in the quest to build a quantum computer using silicon components, which are prized for their low cost and versatility compared to the hardware in todays quantum computers. The team showed that a silicon-spin quantum bit (shown in the box) can communicate with another quantum bit located a significant distance away on a computer chip. The feat could enable connections between multiple quantum bits to perform complex calculations. Credit: Felix Borjans, Princeton University

Princeton scientists demonstrate that two silicon quantum bits can communicate across relatively long distances in a turning point for the technology.

Imagine a world where people could only talk to their next-door neighbor, and messages must be passed house to house to reach far destinations.

Until now, this has been the situation for the bits of hardware that make up a silicon quantum computer, a type of quantum computer with the potential to be cheaper and more versatile than todays versions.

Now a team based at Princeton University has overcome this limitation and demonstrated that two quantum-computing components, known as silicon spin qubits, can interact even when spaced relatively far apart on a computer chip. The study was published today (December 25, 2019) in the journal Nature.

The ability to transmit messages across this distance on a silicon chip unlocks new capabilities for our quantum hardware, said Jason Petta, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton and leader of the study. The eventual goal is to have multiple quantum bits arranged in a two-dimensional grid that can perform even more complex calculations. The study should help in the long term to improve communication of qubits on a chip as well as from one chip to another.

Quantum computers have the potential to tackle challenges beyond the capabilities of everyday computers, such as factoring large numbers. A quantum bit, or qubit, can process far more information than an everyday computer bit because, whereas each classical computer bit can have a value of 0 or 1, a quantum bit can represent a range of values between 0 and 1 simultaneously.

To realize quantum computings promise, these futuristic computers will require tens of thousands of qubits that can communicate with each other. Todays prototype quantum computers from Google, IBM and other companies contain tens of qubits made from a technology involving superconducting circuits, but many technologists view silicon-based qubits as more promising in the long run.

Silicon spin qubits have several advantages over superconducting qubits. The silicon spin qubits retain their quantum state longer than competing qubit technologies. The widespread use of silicon for everyday computers means that silicon-based qubits could be manufactured at low cost.

The challenge stems in part from the fact that silicon spin qubits are made from single electrons and are extremely small.

The wiring or interconnects between multiple qubits is the biggest challenge towards a large scale quantum computer, said James Clarke, director of quantum hardware at Intel, whose team is building silicon qubits using using Intels advanced manufacturing line, and who was not involved in the study. Jason Pettas team has done great work toward proving that spin qubits can be coupled at long distances.

To accomplish this, the Princeton team connected the qubits via a wire that carries light in a manner analogous to the fiber optic wires that deliver internet signals to homes. In this case, however, the wire is actually a narrow cavity containing a single particle of light, or photon, that picks up the message from one qubit and transmits it to the next qubit.

The two qubits were located about half a centimeter, or about the length of a grain of rice, apart. To put that in perspective, if each qubit were the size of a house, the qubit would be able to send a message to another qubit located 750 miles away.

The key step forward was finding a way to get the qubits and the photon to speak the same language by tuning all three to vibrate at the same frequency. The team succeeded in tuning both qubits independently of each other while still coupling them to the photon. Previously the devices architecture permitted coupling of only one qubit to the photon at a time.

You have to balance the qubit energies on both sides of the chip with the photon energy to make all three elements talk to each other, said Felix Borjans, a graduate student and first author on the study. This was the really challenging part of the work.

Each qubit is composed of a single electron trapped in a tiny chamber called a double quantum dot. Electrons possess a property known as spin, which can point up or down in a manner analogous to a compass needle that points north or south. By zapping the electron with a microwave field, the researchers can flip the spin up or down to assign the qubit a quantum state of 1 or 0.

This is the first demonstration of entangling electron spins in silicon separated by distances much larger than the devices housing those spins, said Thaddeus Ladd, senior scientist at HRL Laboratories and a collaborator on the project. Not too long ago, there was doubt as to whether this was possible, due to the conflicting requirements of coupling spins to microwaves and avoiding the effects of noisy charges moving in silicon-based devices. This is an important proof-of-possibility for silicon qubits because it adds substantial flexibility in how to wire those qubits and how to lay them out geometrically in future silicon-based quantum microchips.'

The communication between two distant silicon-based qubits devices builds on previous work by the Petta research team. In a 2010 paper in the journal Science, the team showed it is possible to trap single electrons in quantum wells. In the journal Nature in 2012, the team reported the transfer of quantum information from electron spins in nanowires to microwave-frequency photons, and in 2016 in Science they demonstrated the ability to transmit information from a silicon-based charge qubit to a photon. They demonstrated nearest-neighbor trading of information in qubits in 2017 in Science. And the team showed in 2018 in Nature that a silicon spin qubit could exchange information with a photon.

Jelena Vuckovic, professor of electrical engineering and the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study, commented: Demonstration of long-range interactions between qubits is crucial for further development of quantum technologies such as modular quantum computers and quantum networks. This exciting result from Jason Pettas team is an important milestone towards this goal, as it demonstrates non-local interaction between two electron spins separated by more than 4 millimeters, mediated by a microwave photon. Moreover, to build this quantum circuit, the team employed silicon and germanium materials heavily used in the semiconductor industry.

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Reference: Resonant microwave-mediated interactions between distant electron spins by F. Borjans, X. G. Croot, X. Mi, M. J. Gullans and J. R. Petta, 25 December 2019, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1867-y

In addition to Borjans and Petta, the following contributed to the study: Xanthe Croot, a Dicke postdoctoral fellow; associate research scholar Michael Gullans; and Xiao Mi, who earned his Ph.D. at Princeton in Pettas group and is now a research scientist at Google.

The study was funded by Army Research Office (grant W911NF-15-1-0149) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations EPiQS Initiative (grant GBMF4535).

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Quantum Computing Breakthrough: Silicon Qubits Interact at Long-Distance - SciTechDaily