Superconducting Technology Assessment - nitrd

SOME APPLICATIONS FOR RSFQ
The primary drawback of RSFQ for widespread acceptance is the requirement for cryostatic operation. Despite
this, there are a number of applications for which high speed processing is essential, including communications
applications which already use low-temperature sensors and receivers.
The ever increasing need for network security makes it desirable to have processing at or near the network switch
level (i. e., delays are unacceptable) so that content scanning becomes feasible without compromising network
performance. In a commercial context, very high serial processor speed is desirable to allow cellular phone
CDMA-based networks to sort out additional message streams from the composite signal in the digital domain,
thereby increasing the system capacity and reducing costs.
For the DoD in general, the increasing tempo of warfighting and demands for minimal collateral damage with no
waste of expensive munitions puts increasing pressure on communications systems, as do requirements for
intelligence gathering and processing in a world full of mobile communications devices and other electronics. Low
thermal noise is often desirable for sensors, including radio receivers; digital superconducting electronics can
provide processing capability at 4 K so that raw data can be processed into actionable knowledge locally without
wasting precious communications bandwidth and transmitter power on useless data. Software-defined radios,
wideband dynamic bandwidth allocation, and receivers that use correlation to provide exactly matched filtering
become feasible with sufficient digital processing capability.
Data from NRL suggests that superconducting electronics devices are radiation tolerant, with an upset rate on the
order of 1/10,000 th that of hardened CMOS. Coupled with the low-power operation characteristic of RSFQ,
digital superconducting electronics appears to be an attractive technology for spaceborne applications, as well.
Supercomputing Applications and Considerations
The Integrated High End Computing (IHEC) report documented several areas in which there is an ever-increasing
need for high performance computing:
■ Comprehensive aerospace vehicle design.
■ Signals intelligence (processing and analysis).
■ Operational weather/ocean forecasting.
■ Stealthy ship design.
■ Nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship.
■ Multi-spectral signal and image processing.
■ Army future combat systems.
■ Electromagnetic weapons development.
■ Geospatial intelligence.
■ Threat weapon systems characterization.
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