About the Authors

This book grew out of more than six decades of instrument-building at Berkeley Nucleonics and the curiosity of the people who run it. The pages that follow introduce the company behind the work, the author who guided it, and the two online courses this handbook was written to accompany.

About Berkeley Nucleonics Corporation

Berkeley Nucleonics Corporation (BNC) is a leading manufacturer of precision electronic instrumentation for test, measurement, and nuclear research. The company keeps its corporate headquarters in San Rafael, California, with additional manufacturing facilities and sales offices across the United States and an international network of manufacturer’s representatives.

Since its founding in 1963, BNC has built instruments that meet the most demanding requirements for precision and stability while offering reliability and performance that customers can count on year after year. The company is driven by the long-term needs of industry, and it responds to new challenges as they reach the technical community rather than waiting for them to become routine.

That record shows up across several fields:

• Serving the data and communications industries with RF and microwave instruments that are smaller, lighter, and more portable than the equipment they replaced.
• Developing radiation detection and analysis instrumentation for environmental monitoring, health physics, emergency response, and power generation.
• Responding to the 2011 Fukushima disaster by sending radiation detection and analysis products, trainers, and technicians to Japan to work alongside Japanese agencies on screening and cleanup.
• Offering an accredited program of training seminars in radiation detection, surveillance, and measurement at locations across the United States and online.
• Producing a line of high-quality, low-cost test equipment for general research when the global technical community faced severe budget constraints in 2008.
• Maintaining a leadership position as a developer of custom pulse, signal, light, and function generators, and earning top rank for its digital delay generators in annual industry surveys.

BNC remains committed to its tradition of technical excellence and to staying responsive to the fast-changing priorities of customers in industry, government, and academia. Quantum computing is the latest of those priorities, and it is the reason this book exists. More about the company is available at www.berkeleynucleonics.com.

David A. Brown

David A. Brown is President of Berkeley Nucleonics. After more than three decades with the company, his focus has turned to strategic growth into emerging markets, of which quantum computing is among the most promising. He is a graduate of San Francisco State University’s Lam College of Business.

David grew up with a Commodore 64 and a dot-matrix printer, and that early fascination with what computers could do never left him. He approaches quantum computing as a genuine final frontier, and that enthusiasm runs through this collection of material on the field’s history, technology, career paths, and open technical challenges.

He lives with his wife and two grown children in Northern California, where he enjoys skiing, reading, coaching, and pick-up basketball. An avid sports fan, he follows local high school and college games as closely as he follows the Bay Area’s professional teams.

About This Book

This handbook is the companion to two online courses available at academy.berkeleynucleonics.com:

1. QC01: The Nuts and Bolts (and Qubits) of Quantum Computing, an introduction to the concepts, hardware, and language of the field.
2. QC02: Quantum Computing Instrumentation, a closer look at the measurement and control electronics that make quantum systems work.

Read on its own, the book stands as a self-contained primer. Paired with the courses, it becomes a structured path from first principles to the instrumentation challenges that working engineers face today.