Design Issues in Ultra - Fast Ultra - Low - PowerSuperconductor Batcher - Banyan Switching Fabric Basedon

I present the results of the feasibility study of ultra-fast low-power superconductor digital switches based on Rapid Single-Flux-Quantum (RSFQ) technology. I have considered RSFQ-based crossbar, Batcher-banyan, and shared bus switching fabrics , and the complexity and performance parameters of these circuits have been estimated. The results show that the proposed RSFQ digital switches with overall throughput of 5:76 Tbps operating at an internal clock frequency of 60 GHz and dissipating as low as 45 mW power per fabric could eeectively compete with their semiconductor and photonic counterparts. The most compact and low-power architecture , the Batcher-banyan switching fabric with TDM switching elements, has been selected for implementation and will be discussed in the paper in detail. The rapid increase in the speed of communication networks requires faster digital switching circuits. The only way the traditional semiconductor electronic technologies (Bi-CMOS, GaAs MESFET) can handle hyper-gigabit frequencies is broad parallelizing leading to high power consumption. Emerging photonic technologies, while allowing much higher clock rates, still dissipate enormous power. Consider an example: a 9696 delta-type multistage network implemented in GaAs with 2:5 GHz clock frequency, dissipates 350 W; the same network with 10 GHz clock frequency dissipates 3 kW (rough estimates using data from 2], 8]), and the same network implemented in RSFQ ?