I attended the Organization of American States' Regional Initiative for Cybersecurity Education & Training (RICET2025) in October in beautiful Montevideo, Uruguay last month and was surprised to hear everyone there describing quantum technologies as the next big thing. This is typically how quantum is described, but hearing this from digital professionals was surprising considering most of what constitutes digital is based on quantum mechanics.
On the plane ride(s) home I took a swing at describing the incredible quantum evolution our electronics have taken using the evolution of transistors as inspiration.
Leveraging Our Quantum Mechanical Advantage
A look at the transistors you're surrounded by and how they have led us into the quantum realm!
It’s the 100th anniversary of the discovery of
quantum mechanics in 2025. The UN is celebrating it with the International Year of Quantum, yet many seem to think quantum engineering is the next big thing
rather than what has enabled digital technology to become a revolutionary communications medium. Every digital device you use and many other common technologies
leverage quantum mechanics in some way. We wouldn’t have smartphones,
microwaves, space-based (ie: laser) communication, GPS, or numerous other
everyday technologies without quantum
mechanics.
Carl Sagan’s famous quote came to mind a few weeks ago while I
was on another cybersecurity panel in front of about a thousand years of I.T.
experience in Alberta. When I asked the room, who couldn’t stop flexing their digital
knowhow, to name any quantum devices operating in the room there was a
deafening silence. From the laser enhanced digital projector to the trillions,
yes, trillions of transistors operating in that room, and the gigabytes of solid-state memory recording it all, the amount of quantum engineering in that room
was simply staggering, yet the I.T. crowd who manages it all were oblivious to the science that created it. The Sagan quote that came to mind was: “we live in a world
enabled by science and technology in which almost no one knows anything about
science and technology.” The two things are interlinked and inseparable.
In 1925 a breakthrough happened. Up until then we were happily working with Newtonian mechanics, and it did a fantastic job of telling us when eclipses were going to happen or how to build rudimentary steam engines, but as our instruments improved we began to see problems with Newton’s causal universe. Where we thought of even the smallest things as tiny versions of our own predictable solar system, we suddenly found ourselves looking at particles and wondering why they seemed to sometimes act like waves. In fact, the closer we looked, the more it seemed that the world we knew was an illusion largely based on our scale.
I consider myself a technician turned teacher, so I can honestly say that the details of the science aren’t
front of mind for me, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to know what our
best guesses are about how reality works, especially when it predicates the digital technology I teach. I’m hoping you feel the same way
after reading this.
I’m probably going to maul it, but in the interest of
understanding the quantum mechanical advantage that we’re leveraging all around
us (you’re using it right now to read this), I’ll start with the fundamentals
and focus something we're surrounded by: transistors. You're using billions of them right now to read this.
In the early Twentieth Century we were working with vacuum
tubes to control electricity flow. Early computers like Colossus used
vacuum tubes—devices that allowed electronic control of electrons for
computation and it worked well enough to decipher Nazi Enigma codes. To give
you an idea of the size and efficiency of this technology, if we were to
somehow to build a vacuum tube iPhone equivalent to current ones with nearly
twenty billion transistors in them, it would have to be bigger than Sweden and
would use more energy than the entire human race generates!
Figure 1 an impossible vacuum tube iPhone
equivalent would be bigger than Sweden and use more electricity than humanity
generates, just to be an iPhone!
But things were about to get smaller and more efficient.
It’s this transistor evolution I want to take you on a journey through as it
has been happening throughout your lifetime and is the reason you’re surrounded
with all this baffling digital technology. Transistor evolution also brought us to
quantum scales of engineering in less than 75 years and has been leveraging
quantum mechanics to work since the end of the 20th Century.
Shortly after the war (in 1947) Bardeen, Brattain, and
Shockley invented the first transistor at Bell Labs using germanium and they
were the size of a small matchbox. It was a huge step forward. Comparing it to
the orbital Swedish vacuum tube iPhone mentioned before, one built with these
early transistors (which you could comfortably hold in your hand) would have to
be bigger than a city block and over fifty stories tall!
Figure 2 a 1947 iPhone using the first germanium transistors would be bigger than a city block!
When we discover something new like transistors we tend to
pile on, trying different materials
to see what works best. What we discovered in the early sixties was that
silicon had excellent properties when it came to letting charge through tiny,
engineered gaps, but we didn’t stop at silicon. In another material science breakthrough,
we discovered that thin oxide coatings allowed us to shrink things down to
molecule thin layers, which led to Intel’s breakthrough in the 1970s with the
first microprocessors and integrated circuits containing millions of
transistors in a silicon substrate. And now you know why Silicon Valley isn't called Germanium Valley.
At this point we weren’t harnessing quantum effects, but an understanding of quantum mechanics was necessary to enable us to create quantum aligned designs. This early nanotechnology engineering also confirmed that our quantum mechanical theories were correct and pushed us further. This is a good example of how science drives technology which drives more science and so on.
The problem with our rapid miniaturization was that we were starting to
approach classical (Newtonian) limits where electrons were leaking in strange
quantum ways, which happens when you’ve got barriers only a few molecules wide.
What might boggle your mind is that were there in the late 1970s and '80s!
Once we hit this classical limit engineers began intentionally designing devices that leverage quantum mechanical behavior, like high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) with quantum wells that confine electrons in 2d structures. It was said on the Uruguayan panel that we don’t have a good grasp of quantum mechanics, but we were designing engineering outcomes that leveraged quantum effects in the 1980s! It’s our lack of awareness that creates these confusing 'quantum is the next big thing' headlines.
The latest smartphones can have upwards of twenty billion metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) which leverage quantum effects to run more efficiently and at smaller scales than classical transistors ever could; this is quantum engineering!
We’ve considered orbiting Sweden sized vacuum tube iPhones, and
first transistor city block sized iPhones. If our imaginary old-tech iPhone was
built using the last classical transistors from the 1970s it would be the size
of a skyscraper. We’ve plumbed the quantum depths exploiting the strange
effects we find there to miniaturize things down to the device in your hand. We have a pretty good grip on quantum. It's been the next big thing for the past fifty years.
Figure 3 The thing in your hand that you can't
live without is a wonder of quantum engineering and a key driver of the modern
digital world
Field effect transistors are the foundation of our current electronics, but once again we’re running up against the problem of managing electron flow at incredibly small, quantum scales. I was told at the conference I’m flying back from as I write this that we’re at the end of Moore’s Law and there is nowhere else to go, but that’s classical thinking. Moore’s Law was defined in the age of classical scaling, but quantum engineering gives us new paths for advancing digital technology beyond traditional limits.
When you’re working at scales this small, electrons can
tunnel through energy barriers (even through solid objects) – at
quantum scales things don’t act causally like they do up here. Researchers are
working on leveraging these processes to create tunneling field effect
transistors that, instead of pushing electrons over an energy barrier to open a
transistor, use quantum tunnelling to pass right through, one electron at a
time. In my mind this is like the difference between a steam engine and a
modern Formula One car in terms of efficiency. Yes, your electronics are about
to get smaller and faster again.
Don’t assume we’ve stopped there. We continue to throw material sciences at these quantum engineering challenges. These days graphene electrodes are being used to manipulate electron wave coherence creating single-molecule and quantum interference transistors. That’s a mouthful (I had to write it out then check it twice), but this represents yet another step in our ability to engineer at quantum levels and it needs to be recognized or else we’re left looking like confused monkeys confounded by the digital devices we live on.
This research on quantum interference transistors suggests even more efficient future possibilities. Meanwhile you can buy spintronics right now that rely on the manipulation of the spin state of electrons (an inherently quantum property) to store and manipulate information. The directions we will go in while advancing our engineering of quantum outcomes are fascinating to keep up with. Don't be afraid to make that effort.
We’re not only leveraging our quantum mechanical advantage in transistors. I picked them because they gave me a timeline to follow that you’ll be at least passingly familiar with. As mentioned at the outset, we wouldn’t have lasers, LEDs, MRIs, nuclear medicine, solid state memory and many other technologies you’re surrounded by if quantum mechanics hadn’t pointed us towards them. The only thing true about quantum being the next big thing is in quantum computing, which is wildly divergent from the digital devices looked at here and deserves its own space to unpack.
You are surrounded by quantum mechanical advantage. Celebrate this centenary of our discovery of quantum mechanics by recognizing that it isn't coming soon but is something you've been surrounded by your whole life. Hopefully this approach will give you the context you need to face a future that will only become more quantum.
We really should be teaching this in schools.
