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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

what a load of crap

'With global semiconductor demand rising, this move positions the UK to meet future technological needs, including advancements in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and 6G'?

advancements in artificial intelligence depend on mass production of 4nm silicon cmos, not 100 people doing gallium arsenide for high-speed analog. 'quantum technologies' is vague enough to not be literally a lie (transistors depend on quantum physics to work, as do wires) but in this context it's clearly designed to trick people into thinking 'quantum computing' which is also unrelated to what these guys are doing

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I think this view is a bit narrow in terms of what "AI" advancements may depend on. I think it's very easy to argue that large scale AI adoption will require orders of magnitude higher bandwidth than what we currently have. It's not clear that long term electronics will win in all applications, especially with the strong resurgence in interest of photonic computing. Fundamentally, photonic platforms have much higher potential bandwidth (at the cost of power and size currently) than electronics.

GaAs (and other III-V) would likely be an essential material for some kind of photonic or hybrid compute system.

The response below addressed the quantum sensors, but I would be careful of calling "everything" quantum such as image sensors. Sure they rely on the photoelectric effect which is quantum, but not really in the sense of what we would consider a 'quantum sensor' today.

I suspect what could be more relevant are III-V based SQUID Qubits. These are highly sensitive systems that multiple nations are exploring for submarine detection. More near term, quantum communication via quantum light sources also can leverage a III-V platform.

sure, it's totally possible that the advantages of photonics or optoelectronics could win out, and iii–v semiconductors are pretty important for optoelectronics, though not for pure photonic systems like second-harmonic generation. sometimes people even use gaas for that, especially historically

what are iii–v based squid qubits? google scholar is not helpful except for finding https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevResea.... i thought a squid was a josephson junction device made out of superconductors and insulators, not semiconductors. gaas isn't a superconductor, is it?

this doesn't sound like a quantum communication and squid research lab though. it sounds like a 50-year-old radar chip fab that's being put on life support as a pork barrel project

brain fart on my end, you're definitely correct that SQUIDS are not something demonstrated quite yet, I should have said Josephson junction, but even that seems more niche than I had thought when I wrote the comment.

your comment oscillates between incorrect and incoherent. squids have been demonstrated for decades (i didn't assert they hadn't been) and are made of josephson junctions, whose nicheness is not at issue in this discussion. i hope you get better because you clearly were not well when you wrote this

looooooooool indeed i was somewhere else

:-)

good point. I'd bet this tech is completely useless by now (maybe used in 60s radar and night vision), the company was going to shut down, some politician saw a way to turn a news of layoffs into "I'm bringing AI to my county"

Quantum sensors rely on very precise control of doping conditions. Also these kinds of alloys are used in photonics computing, which is used to interact with qubits. Sounds like that’s what they’re talking about here.

sure, photonics could make sense. what do you mean by 'quantum sensors'? are there any sensors which are not quantum?

In the sense in that literally everything in the world is quantum, sure. But no, I mean sensors which derive their input channel from explicitly quantum effects. Gravometers, magnometers, atomic clocks, etc. are often quantum sensors.

possibly you meant 'gravimeters'; a gravometer is evidently a 19th-century density measurement instrument. plenty of gravimeters are as purely classical as anything electrical is, and those that prominently feature quantum effects are superconducting gravimeters. i don't see how a gaas fab is relevant to either mems gravimeters or superconducting gravimeters!

similarly 'magnometers' are not a thing, and magnetometers are generally either superconducting or pretty classical, so i am getting the feeling you are just trolling me to see if you can get a reaction by posting stuff without any consideration for whether it is true or not

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_sensor

Always pivot to Ai.

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