Nick Farina

It was 10:33 p.m. on a Monday night. I had just received an email saying that my long-awaited queen-sized bed frame from Amazon had arrived and was waiting in the package delivery room directly above my basement-level East Village apartment. I was dead tired after only a few hours of sleep the previous night and about to go to bed when I read the notification but decided to grab the boxes to make sure nothing happened to my $130 investment. I would assemble the frame first thing in the morning.

Over July 4th weekend in 2019, I contracted a bacterial infection in my gut that could not be treated with antibiotics. The only possible medical remedy was to let it run its two-month course. The bacteria wreaked havoc on my small intestine, and I even became lactose intolerant for a period. After the infection resolved, I continued feeling weak and fatigued. So, I turned to Google for a solution.

Scaling has long been recognized as a major hurdle for quantum processors, along with a need for advances in quantum error correction and the control of quantum gates. However, while rapid progress has been made in both of those other areas, far less progress has been made in the development of a CMOS-based scalable system, where the devices and qubits are sufficiently identical that the number of external control signals increases slowly with the number of qubits.