We have designed and tested a parallel 8-bit ERSFQ arithmetic logic unit (ALU). The ALU design employs wavepipelined instruction execution and features modular bit-slice architecture that is easily extendable to any number of bits and adaptable to current recycling. A carry signal synchronized with an asynchronous instruction propagation provides the wavepipeline operation of the ALU. The ALU instruction set consists of 14 arithmetical and logical instructions. It has been designed and simulated for operation up to a 10 GHz clock rate at the 10-kA/cm 2 fabrication process. The ALU is embedded into a shift-registerbased high-frequency testbed with on-chip clock generator to allow for comprehensive high frequency testing for all possible operands. The 8-bit ERSFQ ALU, comprising 6840 Josephson junctions, has been fabricated with MIT Lincoln Lab's 10-kA/cm 2 SFQ5ee fabrication process featuring eight Nb wiring layers and a high-kinetic inductance layer needed for ERSFQ technology. We evaluated the bias margins for all instructions and various operands at both low and high frequency clock. At low frequency, clock and all instruction propagation through ALU were observed with bias margins of +/-11% and +/-9%, respectively. Also at low speed, the ALU exhibited correct functionality for all arithmetical and logical instructions with +/-6% bias margins. We tested the 8-bit ALU for all instructions up to 2.8 GHz clock frequency.
We have designed and tested a parallel 8-bit ERSFQ binary shifter that is one of the essential circuits in the design of the energy-efficient superconducting CPU.The binary shifter performs a bi-directional SHIFT instruction of an 8-bit argument. It consists of a bi-direction triple-port shift register controlled by two (left and right) shift pulse generators asynchronously generating a set number of shift pulses. At first clock cycle, an 8-bit word is loaded into the binary shifter and a 3-bit shift argument is loaded into the desired shift-pulse generator. Next, the generator produces the required number of shift SFQ pulses (from 0 to 7) asynchronously, with a repetition rate set by the internal generator delay of ~ 30 ps. These SFQ pulses are applied to the left (positive) or the right (negative) input of the binary shifter. Finally, after the shift operation is completed, the resulting 8-bit word goes to the parallel output. The complete 8-bit ERSFQ binary shifter, consisting of 820 Josephson junctions, was simulated and optimized using PSCAN2. It was fabricated in MIT Lincoln Lab's 10-kA/cm 2 SFQ5ee fabrication process with a high-kinetic inductance layer. We have successfully tested the binary shifter at both the LSB-to-MSB and MSB-to-LSB propagation regimes for all eight shift arguments. A single shift operation on a single input word demonstrated operational margins of ±16% of the dc bias current. The correct functionality of the 8-bit ERSFQ binary shifter with the large, exhaustive data pattern was observed within ±10% margins of the dc bias current. In this paper, we describe the design and present the test results for the ERSFQ 8-bit parallel binary shifter. Index Terms-Energy-efficient computation, binary shifter, superconducting digital logic, arithmetic logic unit, ERSFQ.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.