MIT researchers have developed a new circuit design which could be 50 to 100 times more energy-efficient compared to current chips.
Superconducting circuits use Josephson junctions that are clocked at 770 gigahertz and are expected to have greater processing power.
Josephson-junction chip is difficult to make and the currents are difficult to detect in the chips, as a result it is used in limited custom-engineered signal-detection applications.
However, the new circuit design has been created to solve the issue related to reading out the results of calculations performed with Josephson junctions.
The researchers have named the new circuit the nanocryotron or nTron, which was tested in light detectors that are capable of registering the arrival of a single light photon.
The team wired the circuits together to create half-adder, a fundamental digital-arithmetic component.
McCaughan demonstrated that currents even smaller than the ones found in Josephson-junction devices could be used to switch the nanocryotron to a nonconductive state.
nTron consisting of a single layer of niobium nitride accumulated on an insulator in T pattern and the current in the base of the T can be small, but the current passing through the crossbar could be large enough to carry information to devices on a computer motherboard.
MIT researcher McCaughan said: "The superconducting-electronics community has seen a lot of devices come and go, without any real-world application.
"But in our paper, we have already applied our device to applications that will be highly relevant to future work in superconducting computing and quantum communications."
