About Speaker
Sébastien Bourdeauducq is an inventor passionate about science, electronics and open source. After working for a few small companies - which included developing the Wi-Fi driver infrastructure for the Nabaztag/tag (150000 units sold) - he founded M-Labs in 2007 (then named Milkymist) which developed a video synthesizer based on open source gateware. One unexpected highlight of the project has been the reuse by NASA of the system-on-chip's memory controller, and its successful launch on board the International Space Station in 2012. Since 2011, Sébastien is providing software, gateware and electronics engineering services to large scientific institutes such as CERN, DESY, and more recently NIST (ARTIQ). Sébastien is also the founder of the EHSM conference on the frontiers of open source and DIY.
Links:
http://m-labs.hk
http://ehsm.eu
About the Topic
The software and the electronics that drive modern experiments in quantum physics are getting more and more complex. ARTIQ, developed by our company in collaboration with NIST, is an open source control system that provides many of the useful abstractions of Python while maintaining the excellent real-time performance required by the physics. An outstanding feature of ARTIQ is the "core language", a Python subset that is compiled and executed on dedicated FPGA hardware with nanosecond timing resolution and sub-microsecond latency. This work enables the testing of fundamental physics theories, and research in quantum computing that has applications in cryptography, chemistry and astronomy.
Remarks
Slides are public domain except some pictures from
wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hong_Kong_Skyline_Restitch_-_Dec_2007.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ebohr1_IP.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scheme_of_spontaneous_parametric_down-conversion.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fpga_xilinx_spartan.jpg
