A new or future system of mobile telecommunication is built by new digital technologies to provide an improved and more consistent quality of service for the customers. These digital systems can provide greater number of transmission channel allocation for their subscribers and security. On the digital communication system, distortion of transmitted signal should be eliminated as much as possible for high communication quality. However, the need to both minimize distortion of signal amplifiers and continue to provide good filtering protection can become difficult to achieve with conventional high power amplifiers and filters. In this paper, the application of high-Tc superconducting (HTS) power filters on such digital communication systems and recent progress of filter device developments for those are discussed.

The latest LSIs still lack performance in pattern matching and picture recognition. Living organisms, on the other hand, devote very little energy to processing of this type, suggesting that they operate according to a fundamentally different concept. There is a notable difference between the two types of processing: the most similar pattern is always chosen by the conventional digital pattern matching process, whereas the choice made by an organism is not always the same: both the most similar patterns and other similar patterns are also chosen stochastically. To realize processing of this latter type, we examined a calculation method for stochastically selecting memorized patterns that show greater similar to the input pattern. Specifically, by the use of a random voltage sequence, we executed stochastic calculation and examined to what extent the accuracy of the solution is improved by increasing the number of random voltage sequences. Although calculation of the Manhattan distance cannot be realized by simply applying stochastic computing, it can be done stochastically by inputting the same random voltage sequence to two modules synchronously. We also found that the accuracy of the solution is improved by increasing the number of random voltage sequences. This processor operates so efficiently that the power consumption for calculation does not increase in proportion to the number of memorized vector elements. This characteristic is equivalent to a higher accuracy being obtained by a smaller number of random voltage sequences: a very promising characteristic of a stochastic associative processor.

Experimental results on the superconducting three-terminal devices Using Bi-system High-Tc Superconductors were reported. The VCJJ (Variabel critical-current-type Josephson junction devices) using the thermal effect (VCJJ) and a dual gate Josephson device of a new current-injection type are described. The basic technology and problems for high-Tc three-terminal devices are briefly discussed.

Sandwich-type Josephson junctions with the structure Bi2Sr2Ca1Cu2Ox/Bi2Sr2Cu1Oy/Bi2Sr2Ca1Cu2Oz (BSCCO/BSCO/BSCCO), have been fabricated and their characterstics determined. The BSCO barrier layer, which is characterized by a crystal structure close to that of the BSCCO electrode layer, is a normal conductor at 4.2 K. Superconductor/normal-conductor/superconductor (S/N/S) type current-voltage characteristics are obtained with these junctions. Distinctive Shapiro steps are observed when they are exposed to microwave radiation. An oscillating behavior of each step in their I-V characteristics are confirmed for increased microwave power. The critical current, Ic, is found to be proportional to (1-T/Tc)2 in the neighborhood of Tc. These results coincide with the ones observed with conventional S/N/S junctions.

A high-Tc superconducting filter of the planar structure is proposed for handling higher power signals and for miniaturizing the filter configuration. The filter is designed with a single disk-resonator shared by two degenerate modes to operate as a two-stage bandpass filter. Thereby the proposed filter is expected to possess high power handling capability as a conventional filter with two resonator disks does while the filter configuration is about a half in area compared to the conventional one. The Tchebyscheff type filter with 5.1 GHz center frequency and 2% relative bandwidth was fabricated using a high-Tc superconducting thin film. The passband insertion loss, Lo, was approximately 0.8 dB at 77 K. The low loss performance due to the superconductivity was observed at incident signal levels up to 41.2 dBm (around 15 W) at 20 K, which is limited by the power devices in the measurement setup. In addition, good linearity in the filter responses was confirmed by observing the intermodulation distortion with the two-tone method, which indirectly shows a stable operation with higher power incident signals.