Today many people are familiar with at least the consequences of Moore's Law -the fastest computer in the shops doubles in speed about every 18 months to two years. This exponential progress, first noted 4 by Gordon Moore -cofounder and former CEO of Intel -in 1965, has continued ever since. But it cannot go on forever. Hurdles exist, for example: silicon will hit problems, with oxide thinness or track width 5 ;
new materials or even new paradigms, such as selfassembled nano-devices or molecular electronics, will be needed; lots of dollars will be required as Moore's second law tells us that fabrication costs are also growing exponentially. However, even if the hurdles can be overcome, we will eventually run into nature.
Very small things do not behave the same way as big ones -they begin to reveal their true quantum nature. Following Moore's Law, an extrapolation of the exponentially decaying number of electrons per elementary device on a chip gets to one electron per device around 2020. This is clearly too naive, but it gives us a hint. Eventually, we will get to scales where quantum phenomena rule, whether we like it or not. If we are unable to control these effects, then data bits in memory or processors will suffer errors from quantum fluctuations and devices will fail. Clearly, this alone makes a strong case for investment in research into quantum devices and quantum control. The results should enable us to push Moore's Law to the limit, evolving conventional IT as far as it can go. However, such quantum research has already shown that the potential exists to do much more -revolution! Instead of playing support act to make better conventional A new quantum information technology (QIT) could emerge in the future, based on current research in the fields of quantum information processing and communication [1][2][3]. In contrast to conventional IT, where quantum mechanics plays a support role in improving the building blocks, fundamental quantum phenomena play a central role in QIPC -information is stored, processed, and communicated according to the laws of quantum physics. This additional freedom could enable future QIT to perform tasks we will never achieve with ordinary IT.