SUPERCONDUCTING ANALOG-TO -DIGITAL CONVERTER WITH A TRIPLE-JUNCTION REVERSIBLE FLIP-FLOP BIDIRECTIONAL COUNTER

A high-performance superconducting analog-to-digital (A/D) converter providing high-speed, high-resolution A/D conversion with low power consumption. The superconducting A/D converter of the present invention includes a bidirectional binary counter having n stages of triple-junction reversible flip-flops, where n is the number of bits of the digital output, and a pair of superconducting inductors for inductively coupling an analog input current to the bidirectional counter. The bidirectional counter algebraically counts incremental changes in the analog input current, increasing the binary count for positive incremental changes in the analog current and decreasing the binary count for negative incremental changes in the analog current. The bidirectional counter requires no gate bias, thus requiring minimal power for operation.