Ram, Rajeev

Date:  Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Time: 11:00
Place: ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HPF G 6
Host:  Jonathan Home

Unconventional Computing in a Scaled CMOS Platform

Rajeev Ram
Department of Engineering, MIT

This presentation will discuss both classical and quantum extensions to the conventional CMOS computing platform. For the last decade, our group has worked to design and implement photonic components and systems into the CMOS computing platform. We have been motivated by the limitations on classical multicore computer architectures imposed by the latency and energy intensity of memory access. Recently, we have reported the first microprocessors with native optical networking functions. The development of highly integrated WDM systems has the potential to relieve congestion at critical points in high-performance computing and data center applications.

The ability to embed optical waveguides, resonators, and photodetectors into a large-scale computing infrastructure presents an opportunity for quantum information processing. It is now well established that any large-scale quantum processor will require significant classical computing resources for control and error-correction. We have recently embarked on a quest to develop a CMOS toolkit for trapped ion based quantum information processing. This platform brings together a high-fidelity quantum computing platform (trapped ions) with large-scale classical computing.  We have demonstrated stable ion-trapping using chips fabricated in a high-performance CMOS logic process. We have developed an architecture that integrates CMOS single-photon counting detectors, waveguide based visble beam-forming optics, and locally synthesized optical pulses to realize a platform for scalable quantum information processing.