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IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity

Analysis of a Shielding Approach for Magnetic Field Tolerant SFQ Circuits

Rodwell S. Bakolo, Johannes A. Delport, Pascal Febvre, Coenrad Johann Fourie

Published Feb 15, 2017• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The operating margins of unshielded SFQ circuits are influenced by external magnetic fields, and earlier research showed experimental results of operating region versus bias current for circuits with in-plane and perpendicularly applied magnetic fields. Here, we report a method that can be used to analyze shields to protect SFQ circuits from external magnetic fields. To validate the approach, we investigated a grid-patterned shield of varying spacing. The analysis was done with cell layouts made according to the Hypres' 4.5 kA/cm2process, in which the top-most layer, M3, was used to implement the shields. It was calculated that a grid shield of 2.5 μm grid bar width and spacing of 5 μm offered a good compromise at both providing shielding and causing a relatively small drift in circuit inductance. In order to make SFQ circuits more tolerant to magnetic fields, we have simulated with circuit parameter alterations to realize the best bias and higher operating held margins, due to external magnetic fields. The external magnetic fields are modeled through three orthogonal coils that generate roughly a uniform magnetic held density throughout the cell under test.

DOI
10.1109/tasc.2017.2669646

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The operating margins of unshielded SFQ circuits are influenced by external magnetic fields, and earlier research showed experimental results of operating region versus bias current for circuits with in-plane and perpendicularly applied magnetic fields. Here, we report a method that can be used to analyze shields to protect SFQ circuits from external magnetic fields. To validate the approach, we investigated a grid-patterned shield of varying spacing. The analysis was done with cell layouts made according to the Hypres' 4.5 kA/cm2process, in which the top-most layer, M3, was used to implement the shields. It was calculated that a grid shield of 2.5 μm grid bar width and spacing of 5 μm offered a good compromise at both providing shielding and causing a relatively small drift in circuit inductance. In order to make SFQ circuits more tolerant to magnetic fields, we have simulated with circuit parameter alterations to realize the best bias and higher operating held margins, due to external magnetic fields. The external magnetic fields are modeled through three orthogonal coils that generate roughly a uniform magnetic held density throughout the cell under test.
An on-chip magnetic shielding technique was characterized on several DC-SQUIDs to prepare the next generation of complex digital RSFQ circuits designed by the FLUXONICS foundry. The maximal frequency of operation of a toggle flip-flop cell was used as a criteria to validate the concept. It goes from a simulated value of 52 GHz (46 ± 2 GHz experimentally), for a McCumber parameter βc= 1 with JC= 1 kA/cm2 in the absence of external magnetic field, down to 29 GHz in the presence of an external field of 88 μT. The shielding technique consists of surrounding a circuit by one or several superconducting niobium loops with the same layers as for the SFQ circuit. The loops are connected to the ground plane with vias. It is shown experimentally that the local magnetic field is reduced by a factor of 4 for the best shielded configuration, which limits the reduction of the maximal frequency of operation in presence of external magnetic field.
A promising application of a single-flux quantum (SFQ) circuit is read-out circuitry for a multi-channel superconductive sensor array. In such applications, the SFQ read-out circuit is expected to operate outside a magnetic shield. We investigated an SFQ circuit structure, which is tolerant to an external magnetic field, using the AIST 2.5kA/cm2 Nb standard 2 process, which has four Nb wiring layers including the ground plane. By covering the entire circuit using an upper Nb wiring layer called the control (CTL) layer, the influences of the external magnetic field on the SFQ circuit operation can be avoided. We experimentally evaluated the sheet inductance of the wiring layer underneath the CTL shielding layer to design a magnetic-field-tolerant SFQ circuit. We implemented and measured test circuits comprising toggle flip-flops (TFFs) to evaluate their magnetic field tolerances. The operating margin and maximum operating frequency of the designed TFF did not deteriorate with increases in the magnetic field applied to the test circuit, whereas the operating margin of the conventional TFF was reduced by applying the magnetic field. We have also demonstrated the high-speed operation of the designed TFF operated in an unshielded environment at a frequency of up to 120GHz with a wide operating margin.
The supply of bias current is one of the key problems to be overcome for fully operational large-scale SFQ circuits. Large currents cause various undesirable effects that degrade circuit operation. The magnetic field induced by a large DC bias current affects the operation of several SFQ cells, even with a microstrip-line structure applied for the bias lines. In this paper, experimental results using SQUIDs show that bias-line shielding is the most effective way to reduce the effect of the DC bias current. The operating margins of SFQ cells were also found to be sensitive to the current in the ground plane. The location of a ground bonding should be close to the point of current injection if we wish to avoid undesirable diffusion of current through the ground plane. We confirmed the effectiveness of bias-line shielding and of the location of ground bonding with a circuit composed of about 500 junctions.
Large-scale SFQ integrated circuits require a large amount of dc-bias current. The magnetic fields induced by the dc-bias currents and the return currents flowing in a ground plane have a great influence on the performance of SFQ circuits. As an approach to reduce the influence, the dc-power (DCP) layer placed under a ground plane is newly introduced in SRL advanced Nb process. We have experimentally evaluated the effects of the DCP layer using SQUIDs and large-scale Josephson transmission line (JTL) circuits with more than 10,000 junctions. The SQUIDs showed that there was small magnetic flux coupling between the DCP lines and themselves and that the coupled flux was enhanced by the return current. The coupled flux decreased with increasing line width of the DCP lines and with increasing distance from the centerlines of them. In the large-scale JTL tests, the cells with DCP patterns showed wider operating margins than the CONNECT OPEN cells with partial magnetic shielding of bias current lines. The test results also showed that a line shape along the periphery of a cell was more effective than a plane shape within a cell as a DCP layer pattern for bias current feeds.
In this study we have investigated the influence of an externally applied ground current on large-scale single-flux-quantum (SFQ) circuits. A Josephson transmission line containing 10 4 junctions with a total bias current of 1.8 A was examined for this purpose. The test results show that the ground current affects the circuit operation remarkably strongly. In the worst case, the ground current of about 10 mA for a 5 mm die chip disturbs the circuit operation. The results also show that DC/SFQ and SFQ/DC converters are very sensitive to the ground current. To eliminate the effect of the ground current, we have made SFQ circuits completely shielded from the external magnetic field by using upper and lower ground planes. It was found that the shielded SFQ circuits are much less sensitive to the ground current. These results show that the magnetic shielding structure is one solution for reducing the effects of the ground current and hence the external magnetic field.
Two effects of the bias supply line on the performance of RSFQ circuits have been studied: inductive coupling between the bias supply line and circuit inductances; effect of the mirrored current in the ground plane. The following results of the study are presented: 3D calculations and experimental measurements of inductive coupling between parallel and perpendicular microstrips in presence of one and two ground planes; calculated margins dependence on the external magnetic field in RSFQ cell. Bias current density extraction method has been developed and implemented in RSFQ circuit design flow.