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IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity

A New Design Approach for High-Throughput Arithmetic Circuits for Single-Flux-Quantum Microprocessors

Masamitsu Tanaka, Yuki Yamanashi, Yoshiaki Kamiya, Aya Akimoto, Naoki Irie, Hee-Joung Park, Akira Fujimaki, Nobuyuki Yoshikawa, Hirotaka Terai, Shinichi Yorozu

Published Jun 1, 2007• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We propose a new design approach for high- throughput arithmetic circuits based on state transitions using single-flux-quantum (SFQ) logic circuits. Microprocessors have several complex interconnects in datapath including loops of data, to which only one SFQ pulse is allowed to be confined, and the loops can spoil the high-throughput nature of SFQ circuits. In our new approach, we regard an arithmetic circuit with loops as a sequential logic circuit, and we use nondestructive readout gates (NDROs) as storage elements of the internal state. We can eliminate the loops and achieve high throughput by translating calculations into transitions of the state stored in the NDROs. We have implemented a bit-serial adder with the proposed approach, and demonstrated 36-GHz operations using the niobium 2.5-kA/cm2standard process technology.

DOI
10.1109/tasc.2007.898714

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We propose a new design approach for high- throughput arithmetic circuits based on state transitions using single-flux-quantum (SFQ) logic circuits. Microprocessors have several complex interconnects in datapath including loops of data, to which only one SFQ pulse is allowed to be confined, and the loops can spoil the high-throughput nature of SFQ circuits. In our new approach, we regard an arithmetic circuit with loops as a sequential logic circuit, and we use nondestructive readout gates (NDROs) as storage elements of the internal state. We can eliminate the loops and achieve high throughput by translating calculations into transitions of the state stored in the NDROs. We have implemented a bit-serial adder with the proposed approach, and demonstrated 36-GHz operations using the niobium 2.5-kA/cm2standard process technology.
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We propose an algorithm of digit-serial adders using single-flux-quantum (SFQ) circuits. The proposed digit-serial adder adapts the carry look-ahead (CLA) adder architecture to generate carry signals, which are generated from the digit-serial data and fed back internally to the following digit-serial data to increase the throughput of the calculation. We have designed and implemented a 4-bit digit-serial adder using the SRL 2.5kA/cm2 niobium standard process to demonstrate its high-speed operation. The total number of Josephson junctions is 2316. We have successfully tested full operations of the 4-bit digit-serial adder with a bias margin of ± 15% at 25GHz. Its maximum operation frequency was 30GHz.
100-GHz Single-Flux-Quantum Bit-Serial Adder Based on 10-kA/cm2{\rm kA/cm}^{2}kA/cm2 Niobium Process
This paper reports the design and test results of a single-flux-quantum (SFQ) bit-serial adder, which we designed with a target-clock frequency of 100 GHz, to investigate several techniques for producing ultra-high-speed computations using SFQ circuits. The bit-serial adder was designed based on a new cell library developed for the ISTEC Advanced Process, where the critical current density and McCumber-Stewart parameters of Josephson junctions were increased to 10 kA/cm2and 2.0, respectively, to obtain higher operating frequencies. In addition, we adopted a circuit-design technique based on state transitions excluding a feedback loop in a typical bit-serial adder, and redesigned the NOR gate with the McCumber-Stewart parameter increased to 4.0 to improve performance. As a result, we experimentally obtained a sufficient dc bias margin of ±18% from low frequencies to 60 GHz, and verified the correctness of operations up to 93 GHz. We also demonstrated that the introduction of a higher bias voltage or large inductors in series with bias resistors is effective for achieving faster operation.
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A novel method of design for controllers of pipelined microprocessors using single-flux-quantum (SFQ) logic has been proposed. The proposed design approach is based on one hot encoding and is very suitable for designing a finite state machine using SFQ logic circuits, where each internal state of the microprocessor is represented by a flip-flop. In this approach, decoding of the internal state can be performed instantaneously, in contrast to the case in the conventional method using a binary state register. Moreover, pipelining is effectively implemented without increasing the circuit size because no pipeline registers are required in the one hot encoding. By using this method, we have designed a controller for our new SFQ microprocessors, which employs pipelining. The number of Josephson junctions of the newly designed controller is 1067, while the previous version without pipelining contains 1721 Josephson junctions. These results indicate that the proposed design approach is very effective for pipelined SFQ microprocessors. We have implemented a new controller using the NEC 2.5 kA cm −2 Nb standard process and confirmed its correct operation experimentally.
We describe the development of single-flux-quantum (SFQ) microprocessors and the related technologies such as designing, circuit architecture, microarchitecture, etc. Since the microprocessors studied here aim for a general-purpose computing system, we employ the complexity-reduced (CORE) architecture in which the high-speed nature of the SFQ circuits is used not for increasing processor performance but for reducing the circuit complexity. The bit-serial processing is the most suitable way to realize the CORE architecture. We assembled all the best technologies concerning SFQ integrated circuits and designed the SFQ microprocessors, CORE1α, CORE1β, and CORE1γ. The CORE1β was made up of about 11000 Josephson junctions and successfully demonstrated. The peak performance reached 1400 million operations per second with a power consumption of 3.4mW. We showed that the SFQ microprocessors had an advantage in a performance density to semiconductor's ones, which lead to the potential for constructing a high performance SFQ-circuit-based computing system.