Projects
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Fundamental Research (S), 2017.
"Study on Adiabatic Single-Flux-Quantum Circuits Operating in the Thermodynamic Energy Limit"
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Fundamental Research (S), 2013.
"Study on Sub-μW Microprocessors using Adiabatic Single-Flux-Quantum Circuits"
Ministry of Education, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Area
"Single-Flux-Quantum Integrated Circuits Based on Localized Electro Magnetic Waves"
Backgorund
CMOS integrated circuits has seen continuous improvement in performance and integration density as the industry tries to keep up with Moore’s law. The supercomputer Fugaku, jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, holds the top spot in TOP500 (ranking of supercomputers by performance) in 2021. It realizes high processing capability with more than 442 PFLOPS using 432 cabinets.
However, its power consumption is almost 30 MW, requiring an enormous amount of electrical power. Furthermore, estimates suggest that if exascale computers (next generation of supercomputers) are implemented using CMOS integrated circuits, its power consumption will exceed 100 MW. This is an enormous amount of power, just as much as a small nuclear power plant, therefore it is unrealistic in terms of power consumption and cost.
Therefore, the Yoshikawa laboratory is conducting research on extremely low-energy superconductor integrated circuits, which are by far more power efficient than CMOS integrated circuits even when taking cryo-cooling into account. The ultimate goal is to eventually scale the technology towards future high-end computing systems.