Santa Barbara, California-based Superconductor Technologies Inc, one of the clutch of companies formed to exploit IBM Corp’s discovery of high temperature superconductivity, has along the way had to master cryogenic techniques, because the term high temperature is relative, and most high-speed superconductors still need to be cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures to work. And it is its cryogenic skills that have won the company a $1.9m contract from the US Naval Research Laboratory to evaluate high-speed cryocooled workstations in conjunction with Sun Microsystems Inc, the Ross Technology unit of Fujitsu Ltd, and privately-held nChip Inc. A hyperSparc subassembly put together by Ross and nCube will be packaged within Superconductor Technologies’ cryogenic subsystem and used at the heart of a Sun Microsystems Inc workstation. The company says that when the nine-month programme is completed, it expects the chips in the workstations to run up to 40% faster than at room temperature before they have been optimised for low-temperature working, and that optimised ones woll run at 100% faster. The programme is being funded by the ubiquitous Advanced Research Projects Agency, which says We are looking at taking cooling one step further by applying it to commodity applications such as high-speed workstations and file servers. We believe that cryoelectronics could quickly grow into a large industry. Superconductor Technology chief executive Daniel Hu reckons that by broadening application of the cryogenic systems for conventional CMOS electronics, it will be able to increase sales for its cryogenic systems and bring down the cost of its high-temperature superconducting cellular and aerospace filtering systems.
