Integration of superconducting technology for a 50 GHz sampling oscilloscope chip

HYPRES, Inc. has introduced a Sampling Oscilloscope/Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR) based on Josephson junction technology to the commercial marketplace. The unit offers measurement performance commensurate with the inherent high speed of the Josephson elements, e.g., risetimes on the order of 8 ps. The Josephson circuitry is contained on a single 1.1 × 1.6 fused silica substrate and housed in an interchangeable measurement module. Only the portion of the chip which contains the superconducting circuitry is cooled with a coplanar transmission line providing the wide bandwidth interface between the room temperature and cryogenic environments less than 1cm apart.