Power Delivery for Cryogenic Scalable Quantum Applications: Challenges and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper evaluates various power transfer architectures for cryogenic quantum systems, analyzing their trade-offs to identify HV non-radiative transfer as a promising scalable solution.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of multiple power transfer methods for cryogenic quantum systems, highlighting the advantages of HV non-radiative transfer.

Findings

HV non-radiative transfer reduces thermal load and noise.

Wireless transfer methods face scalability challenges.

HV wired transfer offers high reliability and efficiency.

Abstract

Quantum technologies offer unprecedented capabilities in computation and secure information transfer. Their implementation requires qubits to operate at cryogenic temperatures (CT) while control and readout electronics typically still remains at room temperature (RT). As systems scale to millions of qubits, the electronics should also operate at CT to avoid a wiring bottleneck. However, wired power transfer from RT for such electronics introduces severe challenges, including thermal load between cooling stages, Joule heating, noise coupling, and wiring scalability. This paper addresses those challenges by evaluating several candidate architectures for scalable power transfer in the dilution frige: high-voltage (HV) wired power transfer, radiative wireless transfer, non-radiative wireless transfer, and a hybrid HV and non-radiative transfer. These architectures are analyzed in terms of thermal load, power loss, heating, coupling noise, power density, scalability, reliability, and complexity. Comparative analysis demonstrates the trade-offs among these architectures, while highlighting HV non-radiative transfer as a promising candidate for scalable quantum systems.