Design Research/Industrial Design/Prototyping
2020
High-speed computers require a dense arrangement of components and connections on an integrated circuit chip, and heat dissipation has become a difficult problem in VLSI due to the fact that densely arranged circuits generate a lot of heat during operation. In superconducting computers, the wiring of ultra-large-scale integrated circuits is made of superconducting materials with close to zero resistance, which can overcome the heat dissipation problem, and the computing speed of the computer will also be greatly improved. The so-called superconductivity means that when some substances are close to absolute zero, the resistance disappears when the current flows.
The concept of a superconducting computer is based on sending an electric current through a supercooled circuit made of superconducting material. Such a system is almost zero resistance, at least in theory. Moreover, according to estimates from some studies, it requires only a small part of the power of traditional computers, ranging from 1/40 to 1.