Today’s fastest parallel computing operations are capable of teraflop speeds. The demand for this kind of computing (a teraflop is a speed of a trillion floating point operations per second) is growing rapidly as intelligence agencies, nuclear research laboratories, universe simulators and weather prediction organisations clamour for more powerful machines.

NioCAD CEO Retief Gerber explains that, as current processor and telecoms technologies approach their physical performance limits, superconductive electronics offers the strongest option for moving computing to the next level. Enter NioCAD, a firm of Stellenbosch engineers and scientists, that is credited with the world’s first end-to-end design automation tool for building superconductive integrated circuits.