Transistor: A messiah for classical and quantum computing
Perhaps the greatest invention of the 20th century that revolutionized the world of communications, the idea behind the development of this device was to find a replacement for the bulky and unreliable Vaccum Tubes, which were mainstream until then to build computers. The first breakthrough happened at Bell Labs by research scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain in inventing a Solid-State amplifying device to replace vacuum tubes with something smaller that consumed lesser power. They worked in a group led by physicist William Shockley. They had developed what is known as a Point-Contact Transistor, the most primitive form of a Solid State transistor. Since then, we have come a long way in increasing their performance over the years by playing around with their architecture, making materialistic improvements, ridiculously shrinking them, etc.
A transistor is a semiconductor device functioning as an amplifier or switch for electrical signals. They are at the heart of modern electronics. Transistors commonly used in digital circuits can be either on or off for low-power applications such as logic gates. Important parameters for this application include the current switched, the voltage handled, and the switching speed, characterized by the rise and fall times. An amplifier generally produces an output (voltage or current), a magnified version of the input (voltage or current). Various configurations of single transistor amplifiers are possible, with some providing current gain, some voltage gain, and some both. From mobile phones to televisions, electronic products which are a common sight in our daily lives include amplifiers for sound reproduction, radio transmission, and signal processing.
Quantum Computing is a type of computing that taps into the statistical world of subatomic particles based on the properties derived from quantum mechanics such as entanglement, superposition, and interference to perform computations generally beyond the reach of classical computers. CMOS technology, known as the holy grail of modern electronics, is one of the strong contenders as the material platform used to host qubits (qubit is the basic unit of quantum information). Silicon, the main constituent of microprocessor chips, is emerging as a promising material for realizing the future quantum processors. Leveraging its well-established CMOS technology would be a clear asset for scalable quantum computing architectures and their co-integration with classical control hardware.
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