IBM abandoned most of its work on Josephson Junction technology several years ago, but the Japanese carried right on researching the potentially super-high-speed technology, and now the Electrotechnical Laboratory of Japan’s Agency of Industrial Science & Technology claims to have developed a complete computer in Josephson technology and claims it operates at 1 GIPS but draws only a fraction of the power of a comparable machine in current technologies. The prototype machine consists of four chips – instruction store, arithmetic-logic unit, dynamic random access memory and a sequencer, on a 4 square board. The computer integrates 26,000 Josephson Junctions fabricated by putting an insulator between two superconducting films – the lab is using Niobium as the superconductor, Aluminium Oxide as the insulator. Power consumption is put at 6.2mW, but the downside of course is that the thing only works if you cool it to minus 268.8oC. Where do such temperat ures exist naturally? Up there in space, where the low power consumption would be an enormous attraction for use in satellites.
