Ding, Szefer Receive NSF Award to Advance Quantum Memory

The National Science Foundation will support a new grant at Yale to develop novel applications and architectures of quantum random access memory (QRAM). The three-year, $900,000 grant will fund a new interdisciplinary collaboration from Yongshan Ding, assistant professor of computer science, and Jakub Szefer, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Liang Jiang, a professor of molecular engineering at the University of Chicago.

"Many quantum algorithms, such as those in quantum machine learning, require an efficient and noise-resilient QRAM that does not exist yet," Ding said. "our team will develop critical software and hardware technologies for QRAM as well as their enabled applications, paving the way for new data processing capabilities in the emergent quantum computers."

To achieve the goal, Ding brings his experience in quantum architecture design, which is concerned with balancing performance, reliability, and cost of quantum computer systems. Ding and his team – including Shifan Xu, Ben Foxman, Dr. Connor Hann, Prof. Steve Girvin – recently demonstrated a novel QRAM architecture that is efficiently embedded in 2-dimensional quantum hardware with limited, nearest-neighbor connectivity, a crucial step toward practical, scalable QRAM. Their work will appear in the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) later this month.