Design Issues in Ultra-Fast Ultra-Low-Power Superconductor Batcher-Banyan Switching Fabric Based on RSFQ Logic/Memory Family

We present the results of the feasibility study of ultra-fast low-power superconductor digital switches based on Rapid Single-Flux-Quantum (RSFQ) technology. We have considered RSFQ-based crossbar, Batcher-banyan, and shared bus switching fabrics, and the complexity and performance parameters of these circuits have been estimated. The results show that the proposed RSFQ digital switches with overall throughput of 5:76 Tbps operating at an internal clock frequency of ¸ 60 GHz and dissipating as low as 45 mW power per fabric could effectively compete with their semiconductor and photonic counterparts. The most compact and low-power architecture, the Batcher-banyan switching fabric with TDM switching elements, has been selected for implementation and will be discussed in the paper in detail. I. RSFQ and Switching Fabrics The rapid increase in the speed of communication networks requires faster digital switching circuits. The only way the traditional semiconductor electronic technologies ..