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IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity

Demonstration of chip-to-chip propagation of single flux quantum pulses

Masaaki Maezawa, Hirotake Yamamori, Alexandre Shoji

Published Mar 1, 2001• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report experimental results on chip-to-chip transfer of single-flux-quantum (SFQ) pulses using an active multichip module (MCM). Josephson transmitters and receivers are integrated on both a chip and an MCM substrate. An MCM consisting of a 4.8-mm chip and an 8.2-mm MCM substrate was fabricated using a 1.6-kA/cm/sup 2/ Nb-trilayer process and a solder-bumped flip-chip bonding technology. The correct operation of the circuit was confirmed by low-speed testing. Bit-error rate (BER) of the circuit was measured down to 10/sup -5/, and extrapolation of the error-function fits suggested a very small BER, lower than 10/sup -200/, at the optimum bias point. Experimental margins on the bias voltage were as large as /spl plusmn/34%.

DOI
10.1109/77.919351

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Applied Physics Letters•Jul 5, 2005•43 citations
We report experimental results on chip-to-chip transfer of single-flux-quantum (SFQ) pulses using an active multichip module (MCM). Josephson transmitters and receivers are integrated on both a chip and an MCM substrate. An MCM consisting of a 4.8-mm chip and an 8.2-mm MCM substrate was fabricated using a 1.6-kA/cm/sup 2/ Nb-trilayer process and a solder-bumped flip-chip bonding technology. The correct operation of the circuit was confirmed by low-speed testing. Bit-error rate (BER) of the circuit was measured down to 10/sup -5/, and extrapolation of the error-function fits suggested a very small BER, lower than 10/sup -200/, at the optimum bias point. Experimental margins on the bias voltage were as large as /spl plusmn/34%.
Chip-to-chip propagation of a single flux quantum (SFQ) pulse has been demonstrated using an active multichip module (MCM) technique in which active transmitters and receivers are integrated on an MCM substrate as well as on a chip. A chip-to-chip SFQ transfer circuit has been designed and implemented by a standard Nb-trilayer process and solder-bumped flip-chip technology. The correct operation of the circuit has been confirmed by low-frequency testing. Experimental margins for the global factor for bias currents have been as large as /spl plusmn/33%.
A 1-b slice of a rapid single-flux quantum (RSFQ) digitizer with interchip communications on a multichip module (MCM) has been successfully designed, fabricated using 3-/spl mu/m Nb technology, and tested. We placed a flash comparator followed by an enable switch and an MCM transmitter circuit on one side of the chip, and an MCM receiver circuit followed by a memory buffer on the other side. The 5 /spl times/ 5 mm chip was flip-chip mounted on a 10 /spl times/ 10 mm carrier chip by a solder bump technique. During circuit operation, the comparator output signal and the clock signal left the chip, moved to the carrier chip, and returned back to the chip into the memory buffer. We operated the circuit with a beat frequency technique where the data input frequency was slightly off from the clock frequency by the beat frequency of 10 kHz. The circuit operated correctly up to 10 GHz. The critical circuit operation margin was observed to be the bias current to the SQUID in the MCM receiver circuit and was about /spl plusmn/6% at 10 GHz.
Superconducting single flux quantum (SFQ) circuits can process information at extremely high speeds, in the range of hundreds of GHz. SFQ circuits are based on Josephson junction cells for switching logic and ballistic transmission for transferring SFQ pulses. Multi-chip modules (MCMs) are often used to implement larger complex designs, which cannot be fit onto a single chip. We have optimized the design of wideband interconnects for transferring signals and SFQ pulses between chips in flip-chip MCMs and evaluated the importance of several design parameters such as the geometry of bump pads on chips, length of passive microstrip lines (MSLs) and number of corners in MSLs as well as flux trapping and fabrication effects on the operating margins of the MCMs. Several test circuits have been designed to evaluate the above mentioned features and fabricated in the framework of a 4.5 kA cm −2 HYPRES process. The MCM bumps for electrical connections have been deposited using a wafer-level electroplating process. We have found that, at the optimized configuration, the maximum operating frequency of the MCM test circuit, a ring oscillator with chip-to-chip connections, approaches 100 GHz and is not noticeably affected by the presence of MCM interconnects, decreasing by only about 3% with respect to the same circuit with no inter-chip connections.
We have developed an interchip data transmission scheme through passive transmission lines on a multi-chip-module (MCM) carrier and 100-/spl mu/m solder bump bonds. In rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ) logic, digital data are in the form of single flux quantum (SFQ) pulses. A reliable scheme for transmission of SFQ pulses through non-superconducting solder bumps between chips through a passive MCM substrate is yet to be established. Therefore, we have devised a scheme that converts SFQ pulses into toggles in a voltage waveform for interchip transmission. Data in the form of SFQ pulses are reconstructed from this voltage waveform using a sensitive quantizing pulse receiver. Our objective is to eliminate the need for amplification of the transmitted signal. This is achieved by increasing the receiver sensitivity. However, a sensitive receiver, a dc SQUID, may produce more than one SFQ pulse for each rising/falling edge of the voltage waveform. A simple circuit, pulse resurrection logic (PRL), is employed to discard any extra SFQ pulses. Together with the sensitive quantizer, the PRL circuit makes our scheme error tolerant. We have demonstrated the receiver operation using 3-/spl mu/m Nb RSFQ circuits at frequencies up to 20 GHz.
A novel approach to chip-to-chip communication for RSFQ technology is proposed. The main idea is to fabricate Josephson junctions on a substrate for multi-chip packaging, which equips the substrate as well as the chip with built-in active drivers and receivers. The driver on the chip is connected directly to the receiver on the substrate through a connector which can be considered as a lumped circuit element. Because the circuit is free from the impedance matching constraint, broadband chip-to-chip data transfer with wide operating margins will be realized. We have designed, simulated and optimized a chip-to-chip single flux quantum (SFQ) pulse transfer circuit. For a connector inductance of 20 pH, the bias current margins and the maximum throughput have been calculated to be /spl plusmn/24% and above 50 Gb/s, respectively.
We report a demonstration of single-flux-quantum (SFQ) pulse transmission between superconductor chips at throughputs beyond 100 Gbps. A fabrication process with a high junction critical current density of 10kA∕cm2 was used to increase the operation speed of a pulse driver and receiver. The chips were flip-chip bonded on a passive microstrip carrier using small solder bumps with diameters of 30μm. With experiments based on a ring-shaped circuit, chip-to-chip SFQ pulse transmission has been demonstrated up to 117 Gbps with an error rate of less than 10−15. The power dissipated by the driver and receiver was only 0.24μW at 117 Gbps.