Chapter 423: The prototype of a quantum chip

And after the chip becomes larger, the cost of a single chip will increase a lot, because in addition to the calculation and control circuit, there are communication circuits and storage circuits inside the chip. The more physical cores, the more complicated these are.
After all, the wires inside the chip will become longer and the resistance will become larger after bigger. Under the condition of the same voltage, the charging speed of the capacitor becomes slower. If the charging is fast, the voltage must be increased, and the voltage will increase. If the heat is too high, then the current will increase accordingly.
Nowadays, the real example is the chip of AMD's thread tearer, which is larger than the ordinary Ryzen chip, but its price is also very high.
So this road is totally unworkable.
Ye Fan's idea is to use carbon materials to make transistors. This is a novel genre that has been proposed by many scientists.
Why do these scientists think carbon can be used? In fact, this has a lot to do with the high-quality characteristics of carbon itself.
For example, for a transistor made of carbon nanotubes, its electron mobility can be a thousand times that of silicon. Generally speaking, the mass base of electrons in carbon materials is better.
Another example is that the free path of electrons in carbon nanotubes is extremely long, which means that the movement of electrons is more free and it is not easy to generate heat by friction.
Because of the advantages of these bottom layers, carbon is used for transistors, and instead of silicon substrate layers, the same level of performance can be achieved without even being as small as silicon transistors.
For example, in a study supported by the American Ministry of Defense in 2018, it hoped to use 90nm specification carbon chips to achieve the same performance as 7nm specification silicon chips.
Today's quantum transistors are also alternative silicon transistors in nature, but it is not electrons but quantum that migrate inside them, but the nature of silicon itself cannot be changed.
Even if carbon is used to make chips, there are many ideas, but these ideas are still in the exploratory stage, and the closest to practicality is the carbon nanotube chip involved in this research project of Peking University. this field.
As early as 2013, American Stanford University produced the world's first carbon nanotube computer, and in August 2019, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released the world's first carbon nanotube universal chip, which contains 14,000 A transistor.
In the then "Nature" magazine, three consecutive articles were published to recommend this result, which shows how big a sensation it caused.
However, even this sensational study published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology only contains 14,000 transistors, which is far from the scale of tens of billions of transistors at every turn of mobile phone chips.
The crux of this lies in the four words of manufacturing process. To produce carbon nanotube chips with performance comparable to commercial components, an important prerequisite is to be able to produce high-purity, high-density, and neatly arranged carbon nanotube chips. Carbon nanotube array.
Once the purity and density of carbon nanotubes are not high enough, or the arrangement is unsatisfactory, it will be difficult to reliably manufacture commercial chips of the scale of hundreds of millions of transistors, because it is not guaranteed that the transistor will fail.
In the study released by MIT in 2019, the purity of the carbon nanotube arrays used was only four nines, or 99.99%.
It is speculated that this purity is at least six nines or eight nines before the performance of carbon nanotube chips can match traditional chips.
In July, the scientific research team of Professor Zhang Zhiyong and Peng Lianmao of Peking University used an original preparation process to prepare carbon nanotube arrays with a purity of up to 99.9999% on a 4-inch substrate.
The two important indicators of density and purity are 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than similar studies in the past.
And based on this high-quality carbon tube array, the researchers also produced corresponding transistors and ring oscillators in batches to verify the mass production potential of this new process.
Through experiments, it was found that the performance of these transistors and ring oscillators surpassed the components in traditional silicon chips of the same size for the first time, proving that carbon chips may indeed be more powerful than silicon chips.
Once carbon nanotubes move towards industrial applications in the future, due to their advantages in power consumption and performance, they are likely to be used in scenarios with demanding energy consumption ratios such as mobile phones and 5G base stations.
If the energy consumption of the chip can continue to drop by two levels, it can use human body fluids to ask questions about these very subtle energy sources for power supply, and the use of scenes will be broader than today's consumer electronics products.
Although carbon does have many excellent properties ~EbookFREE.me~ some electrical properties are even better than silicon, but the biggest limitation of carbon chips is actually the insulating layer in the process.
The silicon substrate as an insulating layer only needs to be oxidized to obtain silicon dioxide, but carbon materials cannot be oxidized as an insulating layer. This process is an important factor that makes carbon unable to replace silicon.
If these problems can be solved smoothly, with the strength of Datang Technology, finished products can be produced in three years, and the carbon transistors will be injected into the quantum transistors of today's quantum computers, realizing the miniaturization of quantum computers.
After all, each of the 1,000 quantum computers in the basement of Datang Technology Headquarters is as big as a large refrigerator, and the quantum transistors, quantum memory and other things in them are really too big.
The volume of a quantum transistor has reached the size of a palm. Because of the nature of its silicon, it cannot be made small. Therefore, there are hundreds of quantum transistors in a quantum computer, not including other parts.
This is also the main reason why quantum computers are so big. If silicon substrates continue to be used as chips, or even transistors, then the smallest quantum transistor can only be as thick as a finger.
If the plan for carbon chips and carbon transistors is successful, then the size of quantum transistors can be reduced to the size of mainstream electronic transistors, and even hundreds of millions of small quantum transistors can be integrated in a palm-sized chip.
In this case, the preliminary quantum chip can be completely manufactured. It is possible that a quantum computer can be the size of a notebook, but its computing power is higher than the combined computing power of all computers in the world.
After all, today's quantum computers do not have quantum chips, but like the first computer, they use a large number of transistors to perform data operations.