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Technology transfer of the pulse-driven AC Josephson Voltage Standard started

20.11.2018

The technology transfer for the pulse-driven Josephson Voltage Standard to the company Supracon (Jena) was successfully started in the framework of the ZIM project “Quantenkomparator”.

 

 

The pulse-driven AC Josephson voltage standard – also called Josephson arbitrary waveform synthesizer (JAWS) – was developed and optimized in the recent years at PTB. Applications in the field of electrical quantum metrology were started already. For this purpose, there is a close cooperation between the departments 2.4 and 2.6.


Within the framework of the ZIM project “Quantenkomparator” the JAWS technology will be transferred to the company Supracon (Jena) to establish a commercial distribution of the JAWS in the future. This project successfully started in August 2017. In the meantime, the JAWS circuit layouts, the Josephson junction parameter and the thin-film fabrication technology were distributed to Supracon. Additionally, other major topics are addressed too, e.g. experimental setup, software control and the sigma-delta coding of the waveforms.


Due to the fact, that the JAWS will be further developed within the project, new test-layouts were commonly designed, and JAWS circuits were fabricated in the PTB cleanroom and finally sent to Supracon. At Supracon some fundamental characteristics were determined with these chips, e.g. Josephson junction parameter, HF-reflection/damping and the load parameter.
At the same time the development of PCB HF-carrier for the modified JAWS chips has been started. These special carriers were fabricated at PTB and sent to Supracon.

 

Wafer layout with test and JAWS circuits

Figure 1: Wafer layout with test and JAWS circuits for the ZIM project “Quantenkomparator”. These circuits were fabricated in the PTB cleanroom and successfully tested at Supracon.