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14 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2024 Matties: What is important for designers to know about mechatronics right now? e future of mechatronics is strong, and I stand by my thought that designers should be cross-disciplined. If you're strictly a PCB designer now, you will increase your value to the company if you begin to look at cross-dis- ciplines. When you walk in for that interview, you can say, "I have a lot of skills to offer your company." Matties: Great advice. Thanks for speaking with us, John. ank you, Barry. It's always great to talk with you all. DESIGN007 Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex problems millions of times faster than some of the world's fastest supercomputers. A net- work of quantum computers could advance these discoveries even faster. Connecting qubits, however, has been challeng- ing for the research community. Some methods form qubits by placing an entire silicon wafer in a rapid annealing oven at very high temperatures. With these methods, qubits randomly form from defects (also known as color centers or quantum emitters) in silicon's crystal lattice. And without knowing exactly where qubits are located in a mate- rial, a quantum computer of connected qubits will be difficult to realize. A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) says that they are the first to use a femtosecond laser to create and "annihilate" qubits on demand, and with preci- sion, by doping silicon with hydrogen. "To make a scalable quantum architecture or network, we need qubits that can reliably form on-demand, at desired locations, so that we know where the qubit is located in a material. And that's why our approach is critical," said Kaushalya Jhuria, a postdoctoral scholar in Berkeley Lab's Accelera- tor Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division. The new method uses a gas environment to form programmable defects called "color centers" in silicon. These color centers are candidates for special telecommunications qubits or "spin photon qubits." T h e m e t h o d a l s o u s e s a n ultrafast femtosecond laser to anneal silicon with pinpoint precision where those qubits should precisely form. A fem- tosecond laser delivers very short pulses of energy within a quadrillionth of a second to a focused target the size of a speck of dust. "Now that we can reliably make color centers, we want to get different qubits to talk to each other—which is an e m b o d i m e n t o f q u a n t u m entanglement—and see which ones perform the best. This is just the beginning," said Jhu- ria. (Source: Berkeley Lab) New Technique Could Help Build Quantum Computers