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Entropy

Chip-Based Electronic System for Quantum Key Distribution

Siyuan Zhang, Wei Mao, Shaobo Luo, Shi‐Hai Sun

Published Apr 29, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) has garnered significant attention due to its unconditional security based on the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. While QKD has been demonstrated by various groups and commercial QKD products are available, the development of a fully chip-based QKD system, aimed at reducing costs, size, and power consumption, remains a significant technological challenge. Most researchers focus on the optical aspects, leaving the integration of the electronic components largely unexplored. In this paper, we present the design of a fully integrated electrical control chip for QKD applications. The chip, fabricated using 28 nm CMOS technology, comprises five main modules: an ARM processor for digital signal processing, delay cells for timing synchronization, ADC for sampling analog signals from monitors, OPAMP for signal amplification, and DAC for generating the required voltage for phase or intensity modulators. According to the simulations, the minimum delay is 11ps, the open-loop gain of the operational amplifier is 86.2 dB, the sampling rate of the ADC reaches 50 MHz, and the DAC achieves a high rate of 100 MHz. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first design and evaluation of a fully integrated driver chip for QKD, holding the potential to significantly enhance QKD system performance. Thus, we believe our work could inspire future investigations toward the development of more efficient and reliable QKD systems.

DOI
10.3390/e26050382

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Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) has garnered significant attention due to its unconditional security based on the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. While QKD has been demonstrated by various groups and commercial QKD products are available, the development of a fully chip-based QKD system, aimed at reducing costs, size, and power consumption, remains a significant technological challenge. Most researchers focus on the optical aspects, leaving the integration of the electronic components largely unexplored. In this paper, we present the design of a fully integrated electrical control chip for QKD applications. The chip, fabricated using 28 nm CMOS technology, comprises five main modules: an ARM processor for digital signal processing, delay cells for timing synchronization, ADC for sampling analog signals from monitors, OPAMP for signal amplification, and DAC for generating the required voltage for phase or intensity modulators. According to the simulations, the minimum delay is 11ps, the open-loop gain of the operational amplifier is 86.2 dB, the sampling rate of the ADC reaches 50 MHz, and the DAC achieves a high rate of 100 MHz. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first design and evaluation of a fully integrated driver chip for QKD, holding the potential to significantly enhance QKD system performance. Thus, we believe our work could inspire future investigations toward the development of more efficient and reliable QKD systems.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a quantum communication technology that offers absolute security. Among its various implementations, continuous-variable (CV) QKD has garnered significant attention due to its high secret key generation rates and compatibility with conventional optical telecommunication infrastructure, which operates under ambient conditions. However, chip-based integration is crucial for realizing practical and scalable CV-QKD networks, and photonic integrated circuit technology is a potential solution, leveraging the on-chip integration of essential optical components onto silicon photonic circuits. Therefore, this work presents a compact, stable, and cost-effective quantum photonic CV-QKD system on a chip. Our architecture combines time- and polarization-multiplexing with high-extinction-ratio pulse generation to mitigate excess noise. At the same time, a real-time feedback control mechanism compensates for polarization drift, ensuring robust system performance. Fiber-based evaluations reveal secret key generation rates of 2.55 Mbps over 25 km and 0.737 Mbps over 50 km with 12 h stable operation, establishing, to our knowledge, a new benchmark for integrated photonic CV-QKD systems with both the transmitter and receiver on-chip. These results mark a significant milestone in on-chip quantum communication, paving the way for widespread adoption of photonic integrated circuits in future metropolitan quantum-secure networks.
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is the most mature method for implementing commercial quantum communications in practice. As part of the miniaturization of practical QKD devices, an integrated electronic system in the 130 nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor process is presented for the QKD sender device. The electronics provide driving signals for the optics at the sender terminal of the quantum channel in QKD and consist mainly of three key modules, namely, a laser diode driver with a high slew rate, a high-speed physical random number generator, and a pre-driver for the electro-optic modulator. The electronic system is designed to operate at frequencies as high as 625-MHz to accommodate the frequency of the QKD system. The high degree of integration is advantageous for miniaturizing QKD sender devices.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) technology is progressively transitioning from experimental research to industrial development. The development of highly integrated and stable QKD modules has thus emerged as a new research direction. Current integrated QKD research primarily focuses on the integration of optical systems, with relatively few studies addressing optoelectronic co-integration. Due to the more stringent demands of QKD systems on driving signal amplitude, noise, and bandwidth, the driving electronics become more complex and power-intensive, making it difficult to achieve the level of optoelectronic integration seen in classical optical communication systems. We propose a hybrid optoelectronic integrating scheme for QKD modules based on chip-on-board technology, which co-packages the QKD-encoding photonic chip and its required electronic driver chips within a compact, centimeter-scale module. By optimizing the layout structure, incorporating thermal management, and implementing active temperature control, the module temperature can be stabilized within a set range. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the module has a total power consumption of 7.69 W and can maintain a stable temperature of 45°C for extended periods when the thermoelectric cooler is active. This effectively ensures the stable operation of the photonic chip and supports long-term QKD functionality, thereby providing technical support for advancing hybrid optoelectronic integrated QKD systems.
Integrated quantum key distribution (QKD) systems based on photonic chips have high scalability and stability, and are promising for further construction of global quantum communications networks. On-chip quantum light sources are a critical component of a fully integrated QKD system; especially a continuous-variable QKD (CV-QKD) system based on coherent detection, which has extremely high requirements for the light sources. Here, for what we believe is the first time, we designed and fabricated two on-chip tunable lasers for CV-QKD, and demonstrated a high-performance system based on these sources. Because of the high output power, fine tunability, and narrow linewidth, the involved on-chip lasers guarantee the accurate shot-noise-limited detection of quantum signals, center wavelength alignment of nonhomologous lasers, and suppression of untrusted excess noise. The system’s secret key rate can reach 0.75 Mb/s at a 50 km fiber distance, and the secure transmission distance can exceed 100 km. Our results mark a breakthrough toward building a fully integrated CV-QKD, and pave the way for a reliable and efficient terrestrial quantum-secure metropolitan area network.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) stands as the most successful application of quantum information science, providing information-theoretic security for key exchange. While it has evolved from proof-of-concept experiments to commercial products, widespread adoption requires chip-based integration to reduce costs, enable mass production, facilitate miniaturization, and enhance system performance. Here, we demonstrate a fully photonic-integrated continuous-variable QKD (CV-QKD) system operating at a classical telecom symbol rate of 16 GBaud. Our system integrates a silicon photonic transmitter circuit (excluding the laser source) and a 20 GHz shot-noise-limited photonic–electronic receiver, which features a phase-diverse silicon photonic integrated circuit and custom-designed GaAs pHEMT transimpedance amplifiers. Advanced digital signal processing allows our system to achieve a secure key rate for discrete-modulated coherent state CV-QKD that reaches 0.289 Gb/s and 0.246 Gb/s over a 20 km fiber link in the asymptotic regime and with finite-size parameter estimation, respectively. These results represent a critical step toward scalable, cost-effective, and mass-deployable quantum-secure communication using photonic-integrated CV-QKD systems.
Integrated photonics has the advantages of miniaturization, low cost, and CMOS compatibility, and it provides a stable, highly integrated, and practical platform for quantum key distribution (QKD). While photonic integration of optical components has greatly reduced the overall cost of QKD systems, single-photon detectors (SPDs) have become the most expensive part of a practical QKD system. In order to circumvent this obstacle and make full use of SPDs, we have designed and fabricated a QKD receiver chip for multiple users. Our chip is based on a time-division multiplexing technique and makes use of a single set of SPDs to support up to four users' QKD. Our proof-of-principle chip-based QKD system is capable of producing an average secret key rate of 13.68 kbps for four users with a quantum bit error rate (QBER) as low as 0.51% over a simulated distance of 20 km in fiber. Our result clearly demonstrates the feasibility of multiplexing SPDs for setting QKD channels with different users using photonic integrated chip and may find applications in the commercialization of quantum communication technology.