Superconductor ICs: the 100-GHz second generation

In the shadow of high-temperature superconductivity, 35 years of research in low-temperature superconductor ICs quietly comes to fruition, yielding the world's fastest circuits. They are made with a superconducting metal, niobium, rather than a compound semiconductor. Their exotic technology is based on Josephson junction devices and the transmission of single quanta of magnetic flux along superconductor interconnects. This paper describes these ICs and also a logic family called rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ) logic, which is based on the storage and transmission of quanta of magnetic flux.