CRYOGENIC RESEARCH.
Abstract
Initial work on the Persistor soon required thin film technology which was considerably beyond the state-of-the-art at that time. Consequently a major fraction of effort was then, and continued to be, devoted to the understanding of the properties of thin films and their methods of fabrication. Somewhat later it became apparent that a crossed-film cryotron could serve both as a logical element and as a memory storage element. Work on the Persistor was discontinued at that time. Another of the major technological problems both here and elsewhere was the difficulty in forming suitable dielectric films. To overcome this problem a dielectric film was developed which employed an electron beam to polymerize a slowly condensing siloxane vapor in vacuum. This proved far superior to the more conventional silicon monoxide technology. The limitations imposed by an essentially two-dimensional logic led to extensive studies of component interconnection in two dimensions. From this came the concept of an associative memory in which logic is deposited without the memory itself. This memory has the additional feature that it can be interrogated based on its contents rather than by use of an assigned address. Later work was devoted towards successful fabrication of a 900-cryotron array which was to form the basis for a small, prototype associative memory. 900-cryotron arrays were fabricated successfully with all of the cryotrons functional, but the difficulties encountered in the use and handling of large area masks ultimately prevented successful production of an associative memory array. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1966
- Accession Number
- AD0653884
Entities
People
- Horace T. Mann