xxx
While adiabatic semiconductor microprocessors exist, the new microprocessor prototype, called MANA (Monolithic Adiabatic iNtegration Architecture), is the world’s first adiabatic superconductor microprocessor. It’s composed of superconducting niobium and relies on hardware components called adiabatic quantum-flux-parametrons (AQFPs). Each AQFP is composed of a few fast-acting Josephson junction switches, which require very little energy to support superconductor electronics. The MANA microprocessor consists of more than 20,000 Josephson junctions (or more than 10,000 AQFPs) in total.
Christopher Ayala is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Advanced Sciences at Yokohama National University, in Japan, who helped develop the new microprocessor. “The AQFPs used to build the microprocessor have been optimized to operate adiabatically such that the energy drawn from the power supply can be recovered under relatively low clock frequencies up to around 10 GHz,” he explains. “This is low compared to the hundreds of gigahertz typically found in conventional superconductor electronics.”
This doesn’t mean that the group’s current-generation device hits 10 GHz speeds, however. In a press statement, Ayala added, “We also show on a separate chip that the data processing part of the microprocessor can operate up to a clock frequency of 2.5 GHz making this on par with today’s computing technologies. We even expect this to increase to 5-10 GHz as we make improvements in our design methodology and our experimental setup.”
The price of entry for the niobium-based microprocessor is of course the cryogenics and the energy cost for cooling the system down to superconducting temperatures.
“But even when taking this cooling overhead into account,” says Ayala, “The AQFP is still about 80 times more energy-efficient when compared to the state-of-the-art semiconductor electronic device, [such as] 7-nm FinFET,
From Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They’re Ultra-Efficient – IEEE Spectrum:
xxx
Snippings 