Temporal Computing With Superconductors

Abstract

Creating computing systems able to address our ever-increasing needs, especially as we reach the end of CMOS transistor scaling, will require truly novel methods of computing. However, the traditional logic abstractions and the digital design patterns we understand so well have coevolved with the hardware technology that has embodied them. As we look past CMOS, there is no reason to think that those same abstractions best serve to encapsulate the computational potential inherent to emerging devices. We posit that a new and radically more efficient foundation for computing lies at the intersection of superconductor electronics and delay-coded computation. Building on recent work in race logic, we show that superconducting circuits can naturally compute directly over temporal relationships between pulse arrivals; that the computational relationships between those pulse arrivals can be formalized through a functional extension to a temporal predicate logic used in the verification community; and that the resulting architectures can operate asynchronously and describe real and useful computations. We verify our hypothesis through a combination of detailed analog circuit models and layout designs, a formal analysis of our abstractions, and an evaluation of several superconducting temporal accelerators.