High Temperature Superconductor Circuit Integration with CMOS Electronics on Sapphire

Various DoD systems are starting to incorporate superconducting devices for sensing and/or manipulating electromagnetic fields, from filters for shipboard communication systems, to superconducting transmission lines for use as a microwave power limiters, to the development of electrically small antennas. With the breakthroughs in the materials and fabrication technologies, it thus becomes feasible to design a system on sapphire with multiple HTS detectors, or analog filters alongside CMOS electronics, with the CMOS performing first stage amplification and/or feedback and/or digital signal processing, with only 10s of microns separating the two, both operating in the cold side. Such a system should have major performance advantages over the present state of the art. However, this effort has not been taken beyond the device concept demonstration. We propose to use the Peregrine semiconductor processing and ion damage Josephson junction fabrication technology to make monolithic devices with HTS detectors/filters integrated with CMOS electronics. The ion damage technology allows fabricating identical junctions with high reproducibility. This project seeks to take the technology to the stage where it is clear to industry that monolithic co-fabrication is viable for DoD systems.