DTN 168: Trump Supercharges US Quantum With Two New Executive Orders

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Trump Seeks to Boost Quantum Computing With New Executive Orders

“President Trump accelerated his efforts to boost the burgeoning quantum-computing industry, signing a pair of executive orders aimed at speeding the development of advanced quantum computers and mitigating the security threats they present.

One of the orders the president signed Monday directs federal agencies, including the Energy Department, to work with the private sector and academics to deploy a quantum computer powerful enough to conduct scientific research by 2028. Such benchmarks are seen as crucial to showing that the technology has real-world applications.

Trump signed a second executive order directing agencies and government security experts to prepare for quantum systems that can evade standard encryption more quickly than previously anticipated. The goal is to bolster security systems across the government and private sector so that advanced quantum hackers can’t take down critical infrastructure.

The orders coincide with billions of dollars in funding for quantum companies being awarded by the Commerce Department and a private-sector investment frenzy from companies including International Business Machines, Microsoft and Google. Companies are betting on what is seen as a promising sector that can complement advances in artificial intelligence. (via Wall Street Journal)

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“IBM has built a new prototype chip with around 100 billion transistors on an area the size of a fingernail, which is twice the density of the company’s previous state-of-the-art technology announced in 2021. The design could pave the way for faster and more energy efficient computers for years to come.

For more than half a century, chipmakers have been able to make ever more powerful computers by following the key principle of Moore’s Law: Cram more transistors onto the chip. To do this, they shrank transistors—the tiny switches that perform computations—to incrementally smaller sizes. But in the last 15 years, transistors have gotten close to the point where quantum mechanics starts to interfere with their function: just a few dozen nanometers in size. They can’t get smaller.

So to fit more transistors on a chip, engineers across the industry are eyeing a pivot to an approach familiar to urban planners: build up. On Thursday, IBM announced it has created a chip that uses this strategy. The new architecture, known as a nanostack, vertically stacks transistors in two layers on a silicon chip.” (via MIT Tech Review)

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