Superconductor electronics: New prospects

The recent discovery of high-Tc superconductivity, and the nearly simultaneous invention of several novel devices have created new prospects for superconductor electronics. In this paper, we are presenting a brief summary of an analysis of the field, carried out recently in our lab. The analysis has shown that utilization of high-Tc superconductors allows cheaper but hardly more perfect electronic components and devices, so that the discovery is expected to have the largest effect on the practical use of the simplest of them, such as EMF shields, microwave modulators, SQUIDs, and samplers. Superconductor LSI circuits including multi-junction voltage standards, A/D and D/A converters, and digital signal processors, although less affected by the advent of the new materials, nevertheless show promise for the future thanks to other recent ideas and results in particular, the invention of the RSFQ logic circuit family and discovery of the correlated single-electron tunneling.