Reconfigurable Superconducting Logic Using Multi-Gate Switching of a Nano-Cryotron

Superconducting (SC) electronics (SCE) is one of the major requirements to develop a large-scale practical quantum computing system. (Figs. 1(a)) [1]. Currently, a room temperature conventional computer is used as the control processor which requires a huge number of lossy interconnects to connect with the qubits placed at a few millikelvin temperatures. This, in turn, limits the scalability of the quantum computing system up to hundreds of qubits which is not enough to achieve the full potential [2]. Therefore, along with a suitable cryogenic memory, a cryogenic (preferably superconducting) control processor is required to develop a quantum computing system with thousands of qubits. Moreover, SCE offers ultra-fast (hundreds of gigahertz) and highly energy efficient (sub attojoule/bit) performance [3]. Therefore, SCE is projected to achieve the department of energy (DOE) exascale goal which the conventional supercomputers failed to achieve (Fig. 1(b)) [4]. However, Josephson junction-based SC circuits suffer from limited integration density due to flux trapping, difficulty in driving large impedances, fanning out digital signals, and operating in noisy environments [5]. To address these existing issues, here, we present a novel reconfigurable SC logic circuit using a nano-cryotron (nTron) that can perform 1-input copy, 2-input AND and OR, and 3-input majority logic functionalities. This work can enable the implementation of highly scalable and energy-efficient SC processor since the use of only one device. To achieve the reconfigurable nature of the logic circuit, we utilize the multi-gate switching of nTron.