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Russian Scientists Claim Development of New Superconducting Memory Architecture
[+hardware]
Russian scientists have reportedly developed a new superconducting memory architecture [eetimes.com] that could be orders of magnitude faster than conventional memory, with switching times of under a nanosecond:
Russian scientists claim to have invented a new superconducting memory architecture that will be 100s of times faster and consume dozens of times less power than conventional memory chips. The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT, Russia) working with the Moscow State University (MSU, Russia) claim the architecture can also be used to perform single-flux quantum logic operations for superconducting processors, but admits that commercialization is decades away.
[...] "This research as published shows great promise in the untapped potential of materials science to advance storage and computing designs," Rick Doherty, research director at Envisioneering (Seaford, N.Y.) told EE Times in an exclusive interview. "Superconducting quantum computer research and designs may get a boost in support and funding thanks to this team's remarkable materials engineering work."
The unique part of the MIPT/MSU project is a new type of superconducting junction and memory architecture. Normal Josephson junctions use sandwiches of superconductor-insulator-superconductor such as in D-Wave's quantum computer, but MIPT/MSU's memory uses adds a normal-metal/ferromagnetic-metal (N/F) interlayer adjacent the insulator to achieve two stable conduction currents that can quickly switch between 1s and 0s. Since superconductors conduct current with zero resistance, the two stable states should take no energy to maintain, argue the scientists in their paper Superconducting phase domains for memory applications [aip.org] [DOI: 10.1063/1.4940440].
The MIPT/MSU researchers claim that read and write operations will be hundreds or even thousands of times faster than with conventional ferromagnetic memory technologies--depending on the final materials formulation--taking just a few hundred picoseconds to switch a 0 to a 1 or visa versa.
