A nanoCryotron comparator can connect single-flux quantum circuits to conventional electronics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a superconducting nanowire device called nTron that acts as a digital comparator, enabling direct connection between single-flux quantum superconducting circuits and conventional CMOS electronics, facilitating hybrid systems.

Contribution

The introduction of an nTron device as an interface to connect superconducting SFQ circuits with CMOS electronics is a novel approach for super-hybrid systems.

Findings

nTron successfully digitizes superconducting device outputs

Enables integration of superconducting and conventional electronics

Facilitates scalable superconducting detector arrays

Abstract

Integration with conventional electronics offers a straightforward and economical approach to upgrading existing superconducting technologies, such as scaling up superconducting detectors into large arrays and combining single flux quantum (SFQ) digital circuits with semiconductor logic and memories. However, direct output signals from superconducting devices (e.g., Josephson junctions) are usually not compatible with the input requirements of conventional devices (e.g., transistors). Here, we demonstrate the use of a single three-terminal superconducting-nanowire device, called the nanocryotron (nTron), as a digital comparator to combine SFQ circuits with mature semiconductor circuits such as complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. Since SFQ circuits can digitize output signals from general superconducting devices and CMOS circuits can interface existing CMOS-compatible electronics, our results demonstrate the feasibility of a general architecture that uses an nTron as an interface to realize a super-hybrid system consisting of superconducting detectors, superconducting quantum electronics, CMOS logic and memories, and other conventional electronics.