News
- ETH Zurich quantum chip sees superconducting qubit act as CPU and the vibrational modes of a fingernail-width acoustic resonator serve as quantum RAM
- The approach borrows from classical computer architecture as it completely flips the script on how modern quantum computing might store short-term data
- The team demonstrated a universal gate set and ran small instances of the quantum Fourier transform and period finding
A guitar string essentially stores a note based on how it vibrates, and if one plucks it differently, an entirely different note plays.
A team of researchers at ETH Zurich has leveraged the same principle to build a quantum chip that stores information by replacing the string with microscopic acoustic resonators.
This allows the chip to increase its working memory significantly, essentially increasing the storage capacity, a prohibitively expensive commodity in quantum computing, significantly.
A vibrations-based quantum storage playETH Zurich's research is led by quantum physicist Yiwen Chu, who used tiny mechanical vibrations to both store and process information. The vibrations, however, go far beyond the range of human hearing, happening inside a quantum chip where they essentially replace or complement the working memory of a quantum computer.
The study, published by the Hybrid Quantum Systems group, lists Professor Yiwen Chu, along with doctoral students Yu Yang and Igor Kladarić, as lead authors and focuses on replicating the division of labor seen in a classical computer.
A superconducting transmon qubit serves as the CPU, while the working memory (the quantum equivalent of RAM) is a high-overtone bulk acoustic wave resonator, or HBAR, whose many vibrational modes each serve as a memory slot.
The Qubit essentially swaps a quantum state from a vibrational mode (reads it, in classical computer terms), manipulates it (modifies it), and swaps it back (writes it). This makes for a unique configuration that most modern quantum computers do not follow, in which processing and storage are two distinct segments; most designs treat both memory and compute similarly.
The approach has advantages, however: acoustic waves have wavelengths roughly a hundred thousand times shorter than electromagnetic ones, allowing an entire quantum chip to be extremely small, as the research team states, even if the actual computer will be many orders of magnitude larger.
The chip has passed stress tests, including a proof of feasibility, which also included testing using two of the most commonly used methods to benchmark a quantum computer: the quantum Fourier transform and a period-finding algorithm.
The endgame here, as noted by the research team, is quantum random-access memory (QRAM), which would allow modern quantum computers to access a much larger store of quantum memory than current specifications allow. Whether this pans out depends on both the scalability of the approach and the computational power in play.
- The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) has bricked thousands of routers
- Flashing alternative firmware like OpenWRT is an option that the ACCC has ignored
- Disposed SamKnows SK-WB8 routers can pose a security risk if they’re not first wiped with a factory reset
The Australian government’s competition regulator, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), has initiated the bricking of some 4,000 routers, rolled out across the country in 2020 in order to collect information on broadband speeds.
Issued as part of the Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) program, the routers were whiteboxes from SamKnows, a subsidiary of Cisco, and given a finite lifespan. That date was reached in June 2026, with the SamKnows SK-WB8 routers remotely disabled on June 30.
As a consequence, Australians are likely to toss the bricked routers, resulting in a sharp increase in e-waste. In doing so, they risk breaches of digital security if the routers are not first wiped. Worse, the ACCC’s position is further confused by the fact that these routers can be flashed, making their destruction quite pointless.
Data discarded, but the routers still workSince the June 30 cut-off, the routers are known to power up, and while bricked for internet access, can seemingly be reused with custom router firmware. The nature of the data collected by the routers for the MBA program was for measurement and customer registration, and this has apparently been deleted, according to emails sent to volunteers of the program.
While accurate figures are unknown, by December 2020 over 2,600 of the SamKnows SK-WB8 routers had been distributed by the ACCC, with 4,000 planned for release across the lifespan of the MBA program.
Attempts to contact the ACCC and Cisco to learn more about why volunteers of the MBA program are being encouraged to dispose of perfectly usable routers have been met with stock, non-committal responses.
The ACCC gave ArsTechnica a potted history of the device and the MBA program, as well as stating that “volunteers are encouraged to unplug their disabled whitebox and dispose of it in an environmentally responsible manner via free e-waste recycling services.”
Should you ditch your ACCC router?If there is no reason to keep your ACCC-supplied router and have a replacement ready, it is important to factory reset the device before disposal. This ensures that any administrator passwords, ISP details, and custom network settings are deleted, keeping them from falling into the wrong hands.
Finding a safe disposal option will help to ensure the router is correctly dismantled. The ACCC has emailed recipients of the SamKnows SK-WB8 routers informing them of the correct disposal procedure, with a link to a live list of e-waste services.
However, if you have the time and inclination to flash OpenWRT, a guide explaining how to do this is available on the OpenWRT page for the SamKnows SK-WB8.