High temperature superconductive microwave technology for space applications

Research on thin film ceramic superconductors has enjoyed success and it is now clear that this technology has advanced to the point that it is ready for application. Many of the thin film applications involve microwave passive devices and there is great interest in the development of high temperature superconductor (HTS) based active three terminal devices to provide the foundation of a complete high performance cryogenic microwave circuit technology. Of course it is widely known that because of the temperature dependence of semiconductor materials especially III-V semiconductor materials, three terminal HTS devices may not be necessary for the development of cryogenic microwave circuits with superior performance. NASA is active in the development of HTS microwave circuit components. In order to provide, in the relatively short term, all of the elements of high performance cryogenic microwave circuits the authors are focusing their active device efforts on optimizing III-V material based on semiconductor active device designs for cryogenic operation. In this paper progress in this work, and also in their HTS microwave passive device development effort is reviewed