Toshiba Cambridge Research Centre Ltd, attached to Cambridge University, is claiming a major breakthrough for developing the world’s first manufacturaable process to fabricate practical Quantum effect integrated circuits: Quantum effect devices exploit the wave-like properties of electrons at the atomic level, but at present the Toshiba process produces parts that only work at close to Absolute Zero; it reckons it can refine the process to get the parts to work at room temperatures and sees it being used in 100G-bit memory chips in the early years of the next century; the circuits are created with molecular beam epitaxy technology with a design rule of 0.001 micron – the process lays down successive layers of semiconductor atom by atom to create devices to be made so small that they can exploit Quantum effect, in which electrons become trapped and are able to move only when a controlling voltage changes.
