There indeed has been research on reversible adiabatic logic in superconducting electronics. But superconducting electronics has a whole host of issues of its own, such as low density and a requirement for ultra-low temperatures.
When I was at Sandia we also had a project exploring ballistic reversible computation (as opposed to adiabatic) in superconducting electronics. We got as far as confirming to our satisfaction that it is possible, but this line of work is a lot farther from major commercial applications than the adiabatic CMOS work.
Possibly, that's an interesting thought. The main benefit of adiabatics as I see them is that, all else being equal, a process improvement of the RC figure can be used to enable either an increase in operating frequency or a decrease in power usage (this is reflected as the additional factor of fRC in the power equation). With traditional CMOS, this only can benefit operating frequency -- power usage is independent of the RC product per se. Supercondition (or near-superconduction) is essentially a huge improvement in RC which wouldn't be able to be realized as an increase in operating frequency due to speed of light limitations, so adiabatics would see an outsize benefit in that case.
There indeed has been research on reversible adiabatic logic in superconducting electronics. But superconducting electronics has a whole host of issues of its own, such as low density and a requirement for ultra-low temperatures.
When I was at Sandia we also had a project exploring ballistic reversible computation (as opposed to adiabatic) in superconducting electronics. We got as far as confirming to our satisfaction that it is possible, but this line of work is a lot farther from major commercial applications than the adiabatic CMOS work.
Possibly, that's an interesting thought. The main benefit of adiabatics as I see them is that, all else being equal, a process improvement of the RC figure can be used to enable either an increase in operating frequency or a decrease in power usage (this is reflected as the additional factor of fRC in the power equation). With traditional CMOS, this only can benefit operating frequency -- power usage is independent of the RC product per se. Supercondition (or near-superconduction) is essentially a huge improvement in RC which wouldn't be able to be realized as an increase in operating frequency due to speed of light limitations, so adiabatics would see an outsize benefit in that case.