Low Power Superconductors

CMOS transistors is the most important technology in today's semiconductor world but we are 5-10 years away achieving the excellence of computing because superconductor makes computing much more faster and less power consumption. New logic designs are emerging that suggested superconducting processes could be not only faster but power efficient. The next generation computers called exaflop computers possesses the ability to execute 10^18 operation per second and about 1000 times much faster than the classical CMOS chip that we have but research shows that it is impossible to built these computers with the sister CMOS technology since the power consumed by these exaflop CMOS chip is 500MW(you might think I am kidding or I wrote something wrong in hurry) but yeah 500MW is it that's the power generated by a nuclear plant.

Superconducting circuits have long been the attractive option for ultra fast operation cooling mercury in liquid helium close to the absolute zero makes mercury a resistance less conductor which carries current smoothly in faster way and without dissipating any power ideally it is considered that superconductor consumes 0 power. But the current technology in the market is somewhat different that the superconductor one. Most superconductor circuits 1990 since are build using the RSFQ (rapid single flux quantum logic), which relays the the bit information in the form of short voltage signal carried by the speeding vortices current. It is used in many technologies but this design too consumes large power when it is scaled up to a processor for high end computers because to distribute current around the gates it uses the bias resistance that consumes 10 times large current that the superconductor logic use for computation. To eliminate the errors some scientist switched the supply from DC to AC which replaced the resistors by the transformers that don’t draw power when circuit is not performing computation. Even though we have different technologies superconductors are absolute in it nature 10 more years and we ll witness the power of superconductors. At this moment all we can say is we are at the ground floor of the revolution.