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arXiv:1403.6423 · Nano Letters

A Superconducting-Nanowire Three-Terminal Electrothermal Device

Adam N. McCaughan, Karl K. Berggren

Published Sep 22, 2014• 175 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Superconducting electronics based on Josephson junctions are used to sense and process electronic signals with minimal loss; however, they are ultrasensitive to magnetic fields, limited in their amplification capabilities, and difficult to manufacture. We have developed a 3-terminal, nanowire-based superconducting electrothermal device which has no Josephson junctions. This device, which we call the nanocryotron, can be patterned from a single thin film of superconducting material with conventional electron-beam lithography. The nanocryotron has a demonstrated gain of >20, can drive impedances of 100 kΩ, and operates in typical ambient magnetic fields. We have additionally applied it both as a digital logic element in a half-adder circuit, and as a digital amplifier for superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors pulses. The nanocryotron has immediate applications in classical and quantum communications, photon sensing, and astronomy, and its input characteristics are suitable for integration with existing superconducting technologies.

DOI
10.1021/nl502629x

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Superconducting electronics based on Josephson junctions are used to sense and process electronic signals with minimal loss; however, they are ultrasensitive to magnetic fields, limited in their amplification capabilities, and difficult to manufacture. We have developed a 3-terminal, nanowire-based superconducting electrothermal device which has no Josephson junctions. This device, which we call the nanocryotron, can be patterned from a single thin film of superconducting material with conventional electron-beam lithography. The nanocryotron has a demonstrated gain of >20, can drive impedances of 100 kΩ, and operates in typical ambient magnetic fields. We have additionally applied it both as a digital logic element in a half-adder circuit, and as a digital amplifier for superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors pulses. The nanocryotron has immediate applications in classical and quantum communications, photon sensing, and astronomy, and its input characteristics are suitable for integration with existing superconducting technologies.
Abstract Integration with conventional electronics offers a straightforward and economical approach to upgrading existing superconducting technologies, such as scaling up superconducting detectors into large arrays and combining single flux quantum (SFQ) digital circuits with semiconductor logic gates and memories. However, direct output signals from superconducting devices (e.g., Josephson junctions) are usually not compatible with the input requirements of conventional devices (e.g., transistors). Here, we demonstrate the use of a single three-terminal superconducting-nanowire device, called the nanocryotron (nTron), as a digital comparator to combine SFQ circuits with mature semiconductor circuits such as complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. Since SFQ circuits can digitize output signals from general superconducting devices and CMOS circuits can interface existing CMOS-compatible electronics, our results demonstrate the feasibility of a general architecture that uses an nTron as an interface to realize a ‘super-hybrid’ system consisting of superconducting detectors, superconducting quantum electronics, CMOS logic gates and memories, and other conventional electronics.
We present a design for a superconducting nanowire binary shift register, which stores digital states in the form of circulating supercurrents in high-kinetic-inductance loops. Adjacent superconducting loops are connected with nanocryotrons, three-terminal electrothermal switches, and fed with an alternating two-phase clock to synchronously transfer the digital state between the loops. A two-loop serial-input shift register was fabricated with thin-film NbN and a bit error rate of less than 10−4 was achieved, when operated at a maximum clock frequency of 83 MHz and in an out-of-plane magnetic field of up to 6 mT. A shift register based on this technology offers an integrated solution for low-power readout of superconducting nanowire single photon detector arrays and is capable of interfacing directly with room-temperature electronics and operating unshielded in high magnetic field environments.
The development of superconducting electronics based on nanocryotrons has been limited so far to few device circuits, in part due to the lack of standard and robust logic cells. Here, we introduce and experimentally demonstrate designs for a set of nanocryotron-based building blocks that can be configured and combined to implement memory and logic functions. The devices were fabricated by patterning a single superconducting layer of niobium nitride and measured in liquid helium on a wide range of operating points. The tests show 10 − 4 bit error rates with above ± 20 % margins up to 50 MHz and the possibility of operating under the effect of an out-of-plane 36 mT magnetic field, with ± 30 % margins at 10 MHz. Additionally, we designed and measured an equivalent delay-flip-flop made of two memory cells to show the possibility of combining multiple building blocks to make larger circuits. These blocks may constitute a solid foundation for the development of nanocryotron logic circuits and finite-state machines with potential applications in the integrated processing and control of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors.
The basis for superconducting electronics can broadly be divided between two technologies: the Josephson junction and the superconducting nanowire. While the Josephson junction (JJ) remains the dominant technology due to its high speed and low power dissipation, recently proposed nanowire devices offer improvements such as gain, high fanout, and compatibility with CMOS circuits. Despite these benefits, nanowire-based electronics have largely been limited to binary operations, with devices switching between the superconducting state and a high-impedance resistive state dominated by uncontrolled hotspot dynamics. Unlike the JJ, they cannot increment an output through successive switching and their operation speeds are limited by their slow thermal-reset times. Thus, there is a need for an intermediate device with the interfacing capabilities of a nanowire but a faster, moderated response allowing for modulation of the output. We present a nanowire device based on controlled fluxon transport. We show that the device is capable of responding proportionally to the strength of its input, unlike other nanowire technologies. The device can be operated to produce a multilevel output with distinguishable states, the number of which can be tuned by circuit parameters. Agreement between experimental results and electrothermal circuit simulations demonstrates that the device is classical and may be readily engineered for applications including use as a multilevel memory.
We demonstrate a multilayer nanoscale cryogenic heater-based switch (M-hTron) that uses a normal-metal heater overlapping a thin-film superconductor separated by a thin insulating layer. The M-hTron eliminates leakage current found in three-terminal superconducting switches and applies heat locally to the superconductor, reducing the energy required to switch the device. Modeling using the energy-balance equations and the acoustic mismatch model demonstrates reasonable agreement with experiment. The M-hTron is a promising device for digital superconducting electronics that require high fan-out and offers the possibility of enhancing readout for superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors.