An adiabatic superconductor 8-bit adder with 24<i>k</i>B<i>T</i> energy dissipation per junction

Abstract

Adiabatic quantum-flux-parametron (AQFP) logic is an energy-efficient superconductor logic family. In this paper, we conducted the high-frequency operation and energy measurement of an AQFP circuit with more than 1000 Josephson junctions in the experiment. We designed an 8-bit carry look-ahead adder (CLA) using AQFP gates and fabricated it using an advanced fabrication technology, the AIST 10 kA/cm2 Nb high-speed standard process. The correct operation of the 8-bit CLA was demonstrated at a 1-GHz clock frequency for a critical carry propagation test vector. The energy dissipation of the 8-bit CLA was measured by observing the power of excitation current. Our results showed that the energy dissipation per operation of the 8-bit CLA can be estimated to be approximately 1.5 aJ, or 24kBT per junction, where kB is the Boltzmann constant and T is the operating temperature.