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Physica C Superconductivity

Design and implementation of double oscillator time-to-digital converter using SFQ logic circuits

T. Nishigai, M. Ito, Nobuyuki Yoshikawa, Akira Fujimaki, Hirotaka Terai, Shinichi Yorozu

Published Jul 19, 2005• 6 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1016/j.physc.2005.02.133

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Direct measurements of propagation delay of single-flux-quantum (SFQ) circuits were performed using SFQ double-oscillator time-to-digital converters. The propagation delay of several SFQ logic gates in our cell library named CONNECT were measured in picosecond resolution. Small discrepancy in the propagation delay of picosecond level was observed between measurement and circuit simulation results. The discrepancy is well explained assuming the parasitic inductance around shunt resistors of Josephson junctions.
We have been developing a time-to-digital converter (TDC) using single-flux-quantum (SFQ) circuits in order to realize an imaging system based on a superconducting strip single-photon detector (SSPD). In this system, the absorption position of a single photon in a meander-shaped SSPD is determined by measuring the delay time of the detected signal propagating through an SSPD delay line. Increasing the time resolution of the TDC is the primary concern for improving the spatial resolution of the system. Here we focused on the double-oscillator SFQ TDC, where the difference of oscillation periods between two SFQ ring oscillators determines the time resolution. In the previous study, a time resolution of about 4 ps was demonstrated by using the Nb standard Josephson integrated circuit (IC) process with a critical current density of 2.5 kA/cm2. In this study, we improved the time resolution by adopting the Nb advanced Josephson IC process with a critical current density of 10 kA/cm2and by optimizing the circuit parameters of the coincidence detector. The histogram and the linearity of the delay measurements show that the time resolution is improved to up to 2 ps.
We have been developing a superconducting time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF-MS) system, which utilizes a superconductive strip ion detector (SSID) and a single-flux-quantum (SFQ) multi-stop time-to-digital converter (TDC). The SFQ multi-stop TDC can measure the time intervals between multiple input signals and directly convert them into binary data. In this study, we designed and implemented 24-bit SFQ multi-stop TDCs with a 3×24-bit FIFO buffer using the AIST Nb standard process (STP2), whose time resolution and dynamic range are 100ps and 1.6ms, respectively. The timing jitter of the TDC was investigated by comparing two types of TDCs: one uses an on-chip SFQ clock generator (CG) and the other uses a microwave oscillator at room temperature. We confirmed the correct operation of both TDCs and evaluated their timing jitter. The experimentally-obtained timing jitter is about 40ns and 700ps for the TDCs with and without the on-chip SFQ CG, respectively, for the measured time interval of 50µs, which linearly increases with increase of the measured time interval.