Earlier this year, the House approved the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act. The legislation is designed to fund basic research in technologies needed to advance computing. The Senate has so far failed to consider it.

The basic research subcommittee of the House Science Committee met Sept. 12 to discuss the issue and to promote molecular and quantum computing as promising alternatives to silicon-based systems. Lawmakers were told that government-funded research into a range of molecular, chemical, quantum and optical devices would begin to emerge over the next decade as silicon-based computing winds down.

"Molecular and chemical devices, quantum computers and optical computing and communications are the technologies that we are exploring now in anticipation that one or more will be the leadership technologies in ten or twenty years," said Ruzena Bajcsy, assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Industry researchers seeking to capitalize on government interest in new computing technologies said they were leveraging their basic research with programs being pursued by government laboratories.

Back to basics

An NSF report on quantum information science released last year called for a basic research program to boost quantum computing technology.

Charles Bennett, a research fellow at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) and a co-author of the NSF report, told the science panel that the government had a "unique role" in supporting basic research in quantum computing as the primary sponsor of university-based fundamental research.

"This research is the base from which new technologies are derived," Bennett said. "This is not research that will get done in the private sector."

As for applications, researchers said both quantum and molecular computers hold promise.

Since "molecular and quantum computers, as currently conceived, have built into them a great deal of information about biochemistry and quantum physics, respectively, I would anticipate that the first applications of these emerging technologies will be to building special-purpose devices for solving biological and quantum mechanical problems, respectively," said Timothy Havel, a researcher affiliated with MIT and Harvard University.