ABSTRACT
The microprocessors that can be found on the market today are manufactured by etching silicon wafers with a precision as small as 14 nm. Although this precision has dramatically improved over the years today’s microprocessors are built with basically the same type of architecture developed for previous microprocessor generations. Reducing the size of elementary components even more could change the nature of the objects involved and they might no longer provide the same functionalities for which they were initially designed. In this size domain, classical physics evolves to quantum physics in many situations and, within this new physical environment, new devices have to be imagined. In this chapter we shall address some of the new phenomena and devices relying on quantum phenomena.
