Clay Montgomery on Zero spin Si

A post by Clay Mongomery on silex and zero spin Silicon on X (twitter)

https://twitter.com/ClayDMontgomery/status/1761835293349495153

Yesterday, I attended a Quantum Computing Conference at UTD, where I met several leading experts in this rapidly developing field. It really helped me to connect some important dots regarding the manufacture of quantum silicon transistors (qubits) and Silex.

Recall that Silex has another partnership called Silicon Quantum Computing. SQC is similar to GLE, but is using lasers to separate isotopes of silicon, rather than uranium. They use silane gas (rather than UF6) as their feedstock and their product is called Zero-Spin Silicon (ZS-Si).

https://clients3.weblink.com.au/pdf/SLX/02764629.pdf

Zero-Spin Silicon is a pure isotope, which is required for the commercial production of quantum computers on silicon wafers, the way conventional computer chips are made.

If you've seen photos of QC that look like expensive brass chandeliers, know that those are just expensive lab experiments that will never be produced commercially. But, QC on silicon is very scalable and real.

Making qubits for QC requires manufacturing at the scale of individual atoms because the transistors must have only single atoms of phosphorous for quantum entanglement to work. Current photolithography equipment can not do that. But, there are MEMs devices that can, but they are too slow to make qubits at scale. That is about to change.

The major criticism of QC has been that it does not solve real world problems, but only academic exercises. But, the developers at this conference believe that QC will threaten current internet security algorithms within 6 to 8 years. That seems to be the main driving force in its development and probably all that is required for large investments into this sector. Consider that just a few years ago, bitcoin mining was a killer-app that put Nvidia and AMD on the map. And now, QC is a huge looming threat to bitcoin.

Online banking is not the first target of QC. The lower hanging fruit are the cryptography methods used to build the blockchains for cryptocurrencies and digital wallets. That's because their algorithms are more vulnerable and they are unsecured by governments, as demonstrated by the colossal collapse of FTX. I think the US government will probably encourage the collapse of cryptocurrencies that are not authorized by any government.

Yesterday, I met Dr. Moheimani, who came to UT Dallas from the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he established their Nanosystems lab. He now leads the MEMs lab at UTD which was enabled by a recent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) award under their Atoms to Product Program, led by Zyvex Labs. His team has developed a prototype device which increases the rate that qubits can be manufactured on silicon by 100X.

This device is like a tiny solenoid that picks individual atoms of hydrogen off wafers so they can be replaced with phosphorous atoms, which then become qubit transistors.Another issue that all QC designs still have is they require cryogenic cooling with liquid helium. I am also bullish on helium producers.

https://x.com/ClayDMontgomery/status/1559355483777077250?s=20