High-speed operation of a 64-bit circular shift register

A 64-bit superconducting rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ) circular shift register (CSR) has been demonstrated to operate at clock frequencies up to 18 GHz. The CSR was designed with special attention to timing constraints, which are more severe for "recurrent" circuits (where data must circulate around closed feedback loops) than for systolic arrays where only local timing constraints are relevant. The longest recurrent data path ever demonstrated previously was only several stages long. The testing scheme demonstrated here is unique in that the data circulated up to 50 million times before verification.