Cryo-Electronics: The Promise and the Challenge

Abstract

Electronic subsystems operating at temperatures significantly below room temperature offer a wide variety of opportunities for performance improvements at lower operational power and smaller size. Semiconducting materials operate at higher speeds with low power consumption; superconducting materials offer zero (low) resistance for interconnects, coils and filters as well as quantum properties for switching and logic elements, and electromagnetic detectors; and magnetic materials offer the possibility of spin-polarized devices. Key issues in the acceptance of cryo-electronics for commercial and military applications are: i) affordable, improved materials coupled with a viable materials integration technology, ii) total systems design which takes advantage of the improved material performance, and iii) affordable, reliable, efficient refrigerators coupled with systems integration. The first and second, (i) and (ii), focus on performance issues necessary to demonstrate the promise of cryo-electronics while the last, (iii), focuses on the challenge of acceptance by a community who does not want the “baggage” of the cryogenic environment to be noticeable.