Superconducting Electronics

During the last decades superconducting electronics has been the most prominent area of research for small scale applications of superconductivity. It has experienced quite a stormy development, from individual low frequency devices to devices with high integration density and pico second switching time. Nowadays it offers small losses, high speed and the potential for large scale integration and is superior to semiconducting devices in many ways ¿ apart from the need for cooling by liquid helium for devices based on classical superconductors like niobium, or cooling by liquid nitrogen or cryocoolers (40K to 77K) for high-Tc superconductors like YBa2Cu3O7. This article gives a short overview over the current state of the art on typical devices out of the main application areas of superconducting electronics