The discovery of high temperature superconductivity – thanks to the disobediance of a pair of researchers at IBM Corp’s Zurich laboratory – is beginning to have an effect on the real world and Illinois Superconductor Corp is preparing to bring to market early next year a cellular band pass receiver filter for use in base stations. The filter is intended to reduce interference on wireless channels, thus enabling cellular operators to reduce the freqency spacing between channels and thus increase the number of channels that can be handled by a single base station. It incorporates high-temperature superconducting materials made in its thick-film fabrication technology. Illinois uses stainless steel or ceramics to make the superconductors, which need to be in curved geometric shapes, cheaply.
