  The demand for high-density data storage with ultrafast accessibility
motivates the search for new memory implementations. Ideally such storage
devices should be robust to input error and to unreliability of individual
elements; furthermore information should be addressed by its content rather
than by its location. Here we present a concept for an associative memory whose
key component is a superconducting array with natural multiconnectivity. Its
intrinsic redundancy is crucial for the content-addressability of the resulting
storage device and also leads to parallel image retrieval. Because patterns are
stored nonlocally both physically and logically in the proposed device,
information access and retrieval are fault-tolerant. This superconducting
memory should exhibit picosecond single-bit acquisition times with negligible
energy dissipation during switching and multiple non-destructive read-outs of
the stored data.
