Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Alam, Shamiul
• Rampini, Dana S.
• Oripov, Bakhrom G.
• McCaughan, Adam N.
• Aziz, Ahmedullah

Titel

Cryogenic reconfigurable logic with superconducting heater cryotron: Enhancing area efficiency and enabling camouflaged processors

Ist Teil von

• Applied physics letters, 2023-10, Vol.123 (15)

Ort / Verlag

Melville: American Institute of Physics

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

AIP Journals (American Institute of Physics)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Superconducting electronics are among the most promising alternatives to conventional CMOS technology, thanks to the ultra-fast speed and ultra-high energy efficiency of the superconducting devices. Having a cryogenic control processor is also a crucial requirement for scaling the existing quantum computers up to thousands of qubits. Despite showing outstanding speed and energy efficiency, Josephson junction-based circuits suffer from several challenges such as flux trapping leading to limited scalability, difficulty in driving high impedances, and so on. Three-terminal cryotron devices have been proposed to solve these issues, which can drive high impedances ( > 100   k Ω) and are free from any flux trapping issue. In this work, we develop a reconfigurable logic circuit using a heater cryotron (hTron). In conventional approaches, the number of devices to perform a logic operation typically increases with the number of inputs. However, here, we demonstrate a single hTron device-based logic circuit that can be reconfigured to perform 1-input copy and NOT, 2-input AND and OR, and 3-input majority logic operations by choosing suitable biasing conditions. Consequently, we can perform any processing task with a much smaller number of devices. Also, since we can perform different logic operations with the same circuit (same layout), we can develop a camouflaged system where all the logic gates will have the same layout. Therefore, this proposed circuit will ensure enhanced hardware security against reverse engineering attacks.