Superconductor digital electronics: Scalability and energy efficiency issues (Review Article)

By S. K. Tolpygo. 2016

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Superconductor digital electronics using Josephson junctions as ultrafast switches and magnetic-flux encoding of information was proposed over 30 years ago as a sub-terahertz clock frequency alternative to semiconductor electronics based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistors. Recently, interest in developing superconductor electronics has been renewed due to a search for energy saving solutions in applications related to high-performance computing. The current state of superconductor electronics and fabrication processes are reviewed in order to evaluate whether this electronics is scalable to a very large scale integration (VLSI) required to achieve computation complexities comparable to CMOS processors. A fully planarized process at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, perhaps the most advanced process developed so far for superconductor electronics, is used as an example. The process has nine superconducting layers: eight Nb wiring layers with the minimum feature size of 350 nm, and a thin s...

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/437841a22b1350755c9036813e565191785da33a