TRW Inc’s Redondo Beach, California-based Applied Technology Division claims to have built the world’s first digital logic gates using high-temperature superconductors and sees their extremely low power consumption and resulting savings in weight and size as giving them potential applications in spacecraft, including signal processing and communications. The company also reckons they could one day replace the transistor-to-transistor logic, a TRW contribution to the industry in the 1960s. Logic gates are formed by a string of direct current superconducting quantum interference devices, thin films of Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide, made using CMOS techniques. At low current, the part is registers zero; when it rises, the voltage drops to signal a 1.
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