Measurement of low bit-error-rates of adiabatic quantum-flux-parametron logic using a superconductor voltage driver

Abstract

Adiabatic quantum-flux-parametron (AQFP) is an energy-efficient superconductor logic. The advantage of AQFP is that the switching energy can be reduced by lowering operation frequencies or by increasing the quality factors of Josephson junctions, while keeping the energy barrier height much larger than thermal energy. In other words, both low energy dissipation and low bit error rates (BERs) can be achieved. In this paper, we report the first measurement results of the low BERs of AQFP logic. We used a superconductor voltage driver with a stack of dc superconducting-quantum-interference-devices to amplify the logic signals of AQFP gates into mV-range voltage signals for the BER measurement. Our measurement results showed 3.3 dB and 2.6 dB operation margins, in which BERs were less than 10−20, for 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps data rates, respectively. While the observed BERs were very low, the estimated switching energy for the 1-Gbps operation was only 2 zJ or 30kBT, where kB is the Boltzmann's constant and T is the temperature. Unlike conventional non-adiabatic logic, BERs are not directly associated with switching energy in AQFP.