Harvard successfully develops sound wave chip, compatible with quantum computers

While traditional computer chips all use electricity, some are just starting to use light to transmit the information inside it. But now scientists at Harvard are demonstrating a new chip that can transmit data in the form of sound waves.

Basically, computer chips and electrical circuits all send and process data by controlling through a specific type of signal. The vast majority of devices and microprocessors today use electricity, or charge carriers, as their flow is directed by components such as transistors that encode data into 0s and 1s – by opening and closing the current.

Recently, several light chips have been developed to manipulate the photons of light and pass them through narrow channels called "waveguides" to transmit data within the chip.

The new chip can transmit data in the form of sound waves.

The new sound chip also works in a similar way to the light chip, but uses sound waves instead of light waves. To do this, the team created a modulator from a material called Lithium Niobate, which can change its elasticity depending on the electric field applied to it, and generate sound waves. By carefully tuning this electric field, the modulator can control the state, amplitude and frequency of the sound waves, encoding the data before sending them through the waveguides.

But what benefit will this bring? According to the team, these sonar chips have several advantages over sound wave chips generated from electromagnetic fields. These sound waves can be easily confined to narrow waveguide structures, they do not interfere with each other and can interact strongly with other parts of the system in which they are used.

Marko Loncar, lead author of the study, said: "Sound waves show promise as a means of transmitting information in chips, for both traditional data processing as well as quantum data, but the development of development of audio integrated circuits has been hampered by the inability to control the sound waves in a scalable and low-loss way."

"In this work, we demonstrate the ability to control acoustic waves on the basis of an integrated Lithium Niobate material, allowing us to take one step closer to sound wave integrated circuits."

By demonstrating the performance of the world's first sonar chip, the team is working on building even more complex acoustic wave integrated circuits and figuring out how to connect them to each other. quantum computer parts, such as superconducting qubits.