Estimates show that in the near future, traditional semiconductors will no longer keep up with our computing demands. That has led to a wave of interest in unlocking the potential of nontraditional computer technologies, including superconducting and quantum computing, spintronics and other emerging alternatives. While many of these technologies show promise, most are far from practical, large-scale integration, and their futures are unclear.
Jennifer Volk, who joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in January 2025 as the John D. Wiley Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is working to develop a recipe for what a future could look like with such nontraditional technologies.
Volk received her bachelor of science in electrical engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2016 and completed her PhD studies in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2024.
“The challenge comes from the complexity of these nontraditional technologies, which is considered to be very high compared to more traditional technologies,” Volk says. “Their fundamental device physics breaks many, if not all, design abstractions and conventional wisdom about trade-offs across the compute stack.”
This, along with slow-to-advance fabrication processes, has limited their adoption and led to many researchers scratching their heads on how to turn single devices into high-performance computers.
Her recipe starts with practical innovations for superconductor electronics. These devices, which are extremely efficient, high speed, and have a relatively mature fabrication process, could have a major impact on data centers, quantum computing, satellite communications, advanced astronomy, and many other computation-intensive applications.
But superconductors come with a catch: because their operating mechanics are fundamentally different from conventional semiconductors, they also require a different design approach. In some cases, researchers force-fit superconductors into conventional computing schemes, which don’t take advantage of their strengths.
In contrast, Volk’s approach focuses on examining and exploiting the opportunities created by the absence of resistance and the intrinsic characteristics of superconducting electronic devices at various levels. “I take a look across the entire compute stack, from architecture down to logic and circuits, and see what’s a good fit for this technology,” she says. “When I started this work, the field was lacking a clear, winning solution for logic, memory, and fan-out—essentially everything that you’d need in a computer.”
Her work has delivered several designs that significantly bolster the density of computation on superconducting chips, as well as a superconducting memory that promises at least two to three orders of magnitude improvement over current state-of-the-art storage density. She has experimentally verified her designs through MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, where she has fabricated her designs for the last five years.
At UW-Madison, Volk plans to follow up on her superconducting research, scaling up experimental demonstrations of her solutions. She also believes she can use insights gained from her work on superconductor electronics to advance other emerging technologies.
Joining UW-Madison, Volk says, gives her an opportunity to enrich her work at all levels. “There is a wonderful collection of folks in ECE, computer science and physics working on superconductors and who are interested in or already working on other nontraditional technologies,” she says. “There are a lot of really cool opportunities to expand our superconducting efforts and to branch out to some other technologies.”