Superconductor electronics: new prospects

The authors review research on superconductance electronics carried out at Moscow State University. It is shown that the utilization of high-T_c superconductors allows cheaper but hardly more perfect electronic components and devices, so that the discovery of these superconductors is expected to have the largest impact on the practical use of the simplest components, such as EMF (electromagnetic field) shields, microwave modulators, SQUIDs (superconducting quantum interference devices), and samplers. Superconducting LSI (large scale integrated) circuits, including multijunction voltage standards, A/D (analog/digital) and D/AS (digital/analog) converters, and digital signal processors, although less affected by the new materials, nevertheless are expected to benefit from other recent ideas and results, in particular, the invention of the RSFQ (resistive or rapid single flux quantum) logic circuit family and the discovery of correlated single-electron tunneling