High Temperature Superconductor Development of Analog-to Digital Converter Components

HYPRES has reported what we believe to be the world's fastest analog-to-digital converter. This superconductive converter has been tested at input bandwidths up to 18GHz but the requirement for refrigeration to 4.2 degrees Kelvin limits the number of applications due to the size, weight, cost and reliability of the refrigerator. If comparable performance could be achieved at temperatures -10 times higher, the cooling requirement would become easily manageable in many situations. Small, cheap, and reliable refrigerators exist at these temperatures. This is the cause of much excitement about high temperature superconductors. Thin films and Josephson junctions have been fabricated from high temperature superconductors for electronic applications. We propose to design, fabricate, and test an Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (YBCO, a high temperature superconductor) circuit which forms the heart of an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The ADC design will be fabricated by the Westinghouse Science and Technology Center. Evaluation of this circuit should allow us to project the dynamic range, linearity, and noise performance of a full ADC. This feasibility study could ultimately lead to very low power, high speed ADC's which are the bottleneck in many signal processing and communications systems.