A superconducting associative memory that is defect tolerant

We present a content-addressable memory whose central component is a superc onducting crossbar array with 2N elements connected by N-2 junctions. Becau se multiple pathways exist between any two elements, this storage device is tolerant to physical defects in the interconnections. Furthermore, each pa ttern of N bits is stored non-locally in the N-2 junctions, so information access and retrieval are tolerant to input errors. This superconducting mem ory should exhibit picosecond single-bit acquisition times with negligible energy dissipation during switching and multiple non-destructive read-outs of the stored data.