HYPRES and Stony Brook University Collaborate to Achieve a 20 GHz 8 Bit Digital Circuit for Future Microprocessors

Elmsford, New York (October 4, 2011)— HYPRES, Inc., the Digital Superconductor Company^™, in collaboration with Stony Brook University (SBU), successfully demonstrated the world’s fastest arithmetic-logic unit (ALU), a 20 GHz 8-bit circuit on a digital superconductor chip produced in the Hypres foundry.  This milestone achievement is an important step in the development of next generation energy efficient, high performance digital circuits for a variety of ultra high speed computing applications.

 As CMOS reaches its energy efficiency limits, there has been an increasing focus on faster and low power core digital logic—such as digital superconductor electronics—capable of being the building block of high-end computing into the next century.  Digital superconductor single flux quantum electronics are capable of providing tens-of-gigahertz processor speeds, without the increasingly high power dissipation of CMOS.  The 8-bit ALU circuit and other digital superconductor circuits created by the HYPRES-Stony Brook team have proven that the relationship between speed and dissipated power has been redefined.

 Growing demands for high-end computing and secure networking are driving the need for both higher clock speeds and energy efficiency,” said Oleg Mukhanov, Ph.D., senior vice president and general manager at HYPRES. “Digital superconductor electronics are ideally suited to provide the required performance and energy efficiencies needed to realize these next generation systems,” explained Dr. Mukhanov, co-inventor of the new digital single flux quantum logic.

 In the development of the ALU chip, Stony Brook professor Mikhail Dorojevets, Ph.D., and his team from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, developed a new asynchronous wave-pipelined processor micro-architecture and a complete cell-level ALU design scalable to 32 and 64-bit processing. The team at HYPRES developed the physical chip design, fabricated and experimentally verified the ALU operation at high speed.

 “This exciting collaboration between the HYPRES and Stony Brook teams has opened the door to a new level of digital superconductor processor performance,” said Dr. Mukhanov. “We are steadily driving this technology into the realm of practical applications.”      

 HYPRES and Stony Brook will continue to collaborate in this effort, working toward new milestones in gigahertz rates for the digital processing circuits.