[IamRobot]

Not certain a "quantum chip" will be adapted into smartphones within 3 years myself, but I am no toshiba or nokia. Wish there were more concise info on this breakthrough.

Scientists from Bristol will this week show a quantum computing chip, which partners such as Toshiba and Nokia hope to build into commercial phones and other systems within the next few years, securing communications and attacking previously insolvable problems.


Quantum computing has the potential to massively speed up calculations and provide more secure communications.

The Bristol Centre for Quantum Photonics hopes to establish and patent key technologies which can be licensed to manufacturers, becoming a central player in the technology which could push electronics beyond the limitations of Moore’s Law.


“We are envisaging a model like ARM or CSR,” said Dr Mark Thompson, the Bristol physicist leading the work, referring to two British chip designers whose low-power processors are manufactured in the Far East, but dominate the world’s smartphones and tablets in the case of ARM, and are important for radio communications in the case of CSR.

“Already, the South West [of England] has the biggest cluster of silicon designers outside of Silicon Valley.”


The proposal is more radical than ARM or CSR, however, as Thompson’s team are building quantum computers with optical waveguides on silicon, instead of simply creating a better design for a conventional chip.

A group of scientists have developed a quantum computer chip that could lead to ultra-fast computer processors, which would outperform those found in today’s standard electronics and smartphones.


The group, led by researchers from the University of Bristol’s Centre for Photonics, will unveil the new silicon quantum chip at the 2012 British Science Festival, which starts Tuesday.


The new silicon chips are significant because they work by manipulating light particles to perform calculations, an improvement over current chips that use electrical currents.


The new chips are also 1,000 times smaller than older chips made of glass, and could eventually be used to develop tiny hybrid processors – a mix of conventional and quantum processors -- in all computers and smartphones.


The centre’s deputy director Mark Thompson said the development of the new, smaller chips means researchers can use the technology in devices that were previously not compatible with older chips.
This means new areas of science can be explored, said Thompson.


“This is very much the start of a new field of quantum-engineering, where state-of-the-art micro-chip manufacturing techniques are used to develop new quantum technologies and will eventually realize quantum computers that will help us understand the most complex scientific problems,” he said in a press release.
LONDON – Quantum computing has been brought a step closer to mass production by a research team led by scientists from the University of Bristol that has made a transition from using glass to silicon.

The Bristol team has been demonstrating quantum photonic effects in glass waveguides for a number of years but the use of a silicon chip to demonstrate photonic quantum mechanical effects such as superposition and entanglement, has the advantage of being a match to contemporary high volume manufacturing methods, the team claimed.

This could allow the creation of hybrid circuits that mix conventional electronic and photonic circuitry with a quantum circuit for applications such as secure communications.