Im currently and analog IC design engineer at Intel. Im not very confident about the future of this area ( next 30 years). While looking at opportunities to branch out I came across superconductivity and quantum computers. Is it worth switching to that area? Any views are welcome. Thanks.
Quantum computing is not as interesting as you probably think it is (speed of light is obeyed and there’s no instantaneous teleportation, some nice enhancements for scope of computation). Superconductivity requires lots of model building and lab work; might be interesting but it seems to be a field where they don’t have any substantial models on high tc superconductors
Ive studied the area a little bit. You are correct, HTS materials like YBCO are not scalable. Only LTS materials are being used currently - Niobium. Obviously this enforces R&D in cryogenic technology. But the easy behaviour of SQUIDS as a qubit makes a way for superfast optimization solutions for large datasets. My argument is that this ability will fulfill hundreds of real life problem scenarios that companies face. And with cloud computing, I wont be surprised if AWS and Azure and the like will start hosting quantum computers soon - in parallel to conventional computers.
AWS has Braket which is quantum computing as a service now but I think it’s really only open to serious researchers. It always feels like there’s progress made with SCs but as you mentioned, unscalable. But perhaps if you’re really interested you should browse the papers coming from top research labs to get a feel of how the field really is at this point. I suspect quantum computing will be implemented for niche problems for these huge companies but not at scale considering the prep time for entangled states.
What is your expectation in the future of IC design here at US? I don’t think everything will get relocated to Asia.
IC design as a whole might not. But analog circuit design might. Scaling down makes it really hard for analog designs using transistors - thereby impacting performance.
Well this has aged well.
Lmao but we will have to wait few months for it to be consistently replicated and then deal with problems of mass production etc
They are still in the research phase, so no one knows where it will go.