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Rapid Single Flux Quantum
In electronics, rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ) is a digital electronic device that uses superconducting devices, namely Josephson junctions, to process digital signals. In RSFQ logic, information is stored in the form of magnetic flux quanta and transferred in the form of Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) voltage pulses. RSFQ is one family of superconducting or SFQ logic. Others include Reciprocal Quantum Logic (RQL), ERSFQ – energy-efficient RSFQ version that does not use bias resistors, etc. Josephson junctions are the active elements for RSFQ electronics, just as transistors are the active elements for semiconductor electronics. RSFQ is a classical digital, not quantum computing, technology. RSFQ is very different from the CMOS transistor technology used in conventional computers: * Superconducting devices require cryogenic temperatures. * picosecond-duration SFQ voltage pulses produced by Josephson junctions are used to encode, process, and transport digital information ins ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electronics
The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification and rectification, which distinguishes it from classical electrical engineering, which only uses passive effects such as resistance, capacitance and inductance to control electric current flow. Electronics has hugely influenced the development of modern society. The central driving force behind the entire electronics industry is the semiconductor industry sector, which has annual sales of over $481 billion as of 2018. The largest industry sector is e-commerce, which generated over $29 trillion in 2017. History and development Electronics has hugely influenced the development of modern society. The identification of the electron in 1897, along with the subsequent invention of the vacuum tube which could amplify and rectify small ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Power Consumption
Electric energy consumption is the form of energy consumption that uses electrical energy. Electric energy consumption is the actual energy demand made on existing electricity supply for transportation, residential, industrial, commercial, and other miscellaneous purposes. Global electricity consumption in 2019 was 22,848 terawatt-hour (TWh), about 135% more than the amount of consumption in 1990 (9,702 TWh). China, United States, and India accounted for over 50% of the global share of electricity consumption. Overview Electric energy is most often measured either in joules (J), or in watt hours (W·h). : 1 W·s = 1 J : 1 W·h = 3600 W·s = 3600 J Electric and electronic devices consume electric energy to generate desired output (i.e., light, heat, motion, etc.). During operation, some part of the energy is lost depending on the electrical efficiency. Electricity has been generated in power stations since 1882. The invention of the steam turbine in 1884 to drive the electr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Superconducting Logic
Superconducting logic refers to a class of logic circuits or logic gates that use the unique properties of superconductors, including zero-resistance wires, ultrafast Josephson junction switches, and quantization of magnetic flux (fluxoid). Superconducting computing is a form of Cryogenic processor, cryogenic computing, as superconductive electronic circuits require cooling to cryogenic temperatures for operation, typically below 10 kelvin. Often superconducting computing is applied to quantum computing, with an important application known as superconducting quantum computing. Superconducting digital logic circuits use single flux quanta (SFQ), also known as magnetic flux quantum, magnetic flux quanta, to encode, process, and transport data. SFQ circuits are made up of active Josephson junctions and passive elements such as inductors, resistors, transformers, and transmission lines. Whereas voltages and capacitors are important in semiconductor logic circuits such as CMOS, curr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Analog-to-digital Converter
In electronics, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC, A/D, or A-to-D) is a system that converts an analog signal, such as a sound picked up by a microphone or light entering a digital camera, into a digital signal. An ADC may also provide an isolated measurement such as an electronic device that converts an analog input voltage or current to a digital number representing the magnitude of the voltage or current. Typically the digital output is a two's complement binary number that is proportional to the input, but there are other possibilities. There are several ADC architectures. Due to the complexity and the need for precisely matched components, all but the most specialized ADCs are implemented as integrated circuits (ICs). These typically take the form of metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) mixed-signal integrated circuit chips that integrate both analog and digital circuits. A digital-to-analog converter (DAC) performs the reverse function; it converts a digital signa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software-defined Radio
Software-defined radio (SDR) is a radio communication system where components that have been traditionally implemented in analog hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by means of software on a personal computer or embedded system. While the concept of SDR is not new, the rapidly evolving capabilities of digital electronics render practical many processes which were once only theoretically possible. A basic SDR system may consist of a personal computer equipped with a sound card, or other analog-to-digital converter, preceded by some form of RF front end. Significant amounts of signal processing are handed over to the general-purpose processor, rather than being done in special-purpose hardware (electronic circuits). Such a design produces a radio which can receive and transmit widely different radio protocols (sometimes referred to as waveforms) based solely on the software used. Software radios have signif ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Signal Processing
Digital signal processing (DSP) is the use of digital processing, such as by computers or more specialized digital signal processors, to perform a wide variety of signal processing operations. The digital signals processed in this manner are a sequence of numbers that represent samples of a continuous variable in a domain such as time, space, or frequency. In digital electronics, a digital signal is represented as a pulse train, which is typically generated by the switching of a transistor. Digital signal processing and analog signal processing are subfields of signal processing. DSP applications include audio and speech processing, sonar, radar and other sensor array processing, spectral density estimation, statistical signal processing, digital image processing, data compression, video coding, audio coding, image compression, signal processing for telecommunications, control systems, biomedical engineering, and seismology, among others. DSP can involve linear or nonli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disruptive Technology
In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. The concept was developed by the American academic Clayton Christensen and his collaborators beginning in 1995, and has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century. Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James A. Evans generalized this term to identify disruptive science and technological advances from more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014. Their work was featured as the cover of the February 2019 issue of ''Nature'' and was selected as the Altmetric 100 most-discussed work in 2019. Not all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary. For example, the first automobiles in the late 19th century were not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensiv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Josephson Energy
In physics, the Josephson effect is a phenomenon that occurs when two superconductors are placed in proximity, with some barrier or restriction between them. It is an example of a macroscopic quantum phenomenon, where the effects of quantum mechanics are observable at ordinary, rather than atomic, scale. The Josephson effect has many practical applications because it exhibits a precise relationship between different physics quantities, such as voltage and frequency, facilitating highly accurate measurements. The Josephson effect produces a current, known as a supercurrent, that flows continuously without any voltage applied, across a device known as a Josephson junction (JJ). These consist of two or more superconductors coupled by a weak link. The weak link can be a thin insulating barrier (known as a superconducting tunnel junction, superconductor–insulator–superconductor junction, or S-I-S), a short section of non-superconducting metal (S-N-S), or a physical constriction th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
High-temperature Superconductor
High-temperature superconductors (abbreviated high-c or HTS) are defined as materials that behave as superconductors at temperatures above , the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. The adjective "high temperature" is only in respect to previously known superconductors, which function at even colder temperatures close to absolute zero. In absolute terms, these "high temperatures" are still far below ambient, and therefore require cooling. The first high-temperature superconductor was discovered in 1986, by IBM researchers Bednorz and Müller, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials". Most high-c materials are type-II superconductors. The major advantage of high-temperature superconductors is that they can be cooled by using liquid nitrogen, as opposed to the previously known superconductors which require expensive and hard-to-handle coolants, primarily liquid helium. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thermal Noise
A thermal column (or thermal) is a rising mass of buoyant air, a convective current in the atmosphere, that transfers heat energy vertically. Thermals are created by the uneven heating of Earth's surface from solar radiation, and are an example of convection, specifically atmospheric convection. Thermals on Earth The Sun warms the ground, which in turn warms the air directly above. The warm air near the surface expands, becoming less dense than the surrounding air. The lighter air rises and cools due to its expansion in the lower pressure at higher altitudes. It stops rising when it has cooled to the same temperature, thus density, as the surrounding air. Associated with a thermal is a downward flow surrounding the thermal column. The downward-moving exterior is caused by colder air being displaced at the top of the thermal. The size and strength of thermals are influenced by the properties of the lower atmosphere (the ''troposphere''). When the air is cold, bubbles of warm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pulse Tube Refrigerator
The pulse tube refrigerator (PTR) or pulse tube cryocooler is a developing technology that emerged largely in the early 1980s with a series of other innovations in the broader field of thermoacoustics. In contrast with other cryocoolers (e.g. applications of the Stirling engine#Stirling cryocoolers, Stirling cryocooler and cryocooler#GM-refrigerators, GM-refrigerators), this cryocooler can be made without moving parts in the low temperature part of the device, making the cooler suitable for a wide variety of applications. Uses Pulse tube cryocoolers are used in industrial applications such as semiconductor fabrication and in military applications such as for the cooling of infrared sensors. Pulse tubes are also being developed for cooling of astronomical detectors where liquid cryogens are typically used, such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope or the Qubic experiment (an interferometer for cosmology studies). PTRs are used as precoolers of dilution refrigerators. Pulse tubes are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liquid Helium
Liquid helium is a physical state of helium at very low temperatures at standard atmospheric pressures. Liquid helium may show superfluidity. At standard pressure, the chemical element helium exists in a liquid form only at the extremely low temperature of . Its boiling point and critical point depend on which isotope of helium is present: the common isotope helium-4 or the rare isotope helium-3. These are the only two stable isotopes of helium. See the table below for the values of these physical quantities. The density of liquid helium-4 at its boiling point and a pressure of one atmosphere (101.3 kilopascals) is about , or about one-eighth the density of liquid water. Liquefaction Helium was first liquefied on July 10, 1908, by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. At that time, helium-3 was unknown because the mass spectrometer had not yet been invented. In more recent decades, liquid helium has been used as a cryogenic ref ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
