Home Project Definition The Team Project Documents T & E GOV

Technical Approach

The ColdFlux Team's technical approach was chosen to arrive at a complete design tool chain so that the design, implementation, and verification of a superconductice electronic (SCE) circuits can be demonstrated. The team plans to code all CAD software modules in C/C++ with which they are very experienced. Various tools will be integrated into an integrated design environment equipped with layout and schematic entry and editing tools and various low-level (TCAD and SPICE) and high-level (HDL) simulators and analysis engines. An online code repository and version management system will be set up to allow all contributors and assessors to compile the latest source code. The design philosophy is a plug-and-play CAD tool platform in which the best design optimization techniques can be rapidly coded and plugged into the tool chain. There will be no re-invention of the wheel, that is, whenever possible, the team will adopt existing public-domain, open-source tools targeting CMOS circuits as the starting point and subsequently augment and build specialized versions of the same targeting SCE in general and DC/AC-biased Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) logic families in particular.

ColdFlux team comprises of renown experts in various fields of electronic design automation and SCE with proven and established track records and typically a history of having successfully worked together. The team has the knowledge and expertise to greatly advance the state-of-the-art in terms in technology and Integrated Circuit (IC) CAD techniques. IT will also produce a set of integrated open-source tools that can be used by researchers to develop SFQ-based ICs efficiently and with high confidence of success. It is expected that the open-source electronic design automation framework for SCE will remove barriers to entry to many designers in both academia and industry and will launch an era of rapid growth and widespread adaptation of SCE as a promising and mature beyond-CMOS computing solution.

Expected Results

To develop EDA and TCAD flows and tools for automated synthesis from behavioral RTL to GDS-II, optimization, verification , and test of SFQ-based logic circuits, including: