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Superconducting Technology Assessment - nitrd

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Ground Plane<br />

Counter/B arrier/Base Electrodes<br />

Resistor<br />

Resistor<br />

Wire 3<br />

Plug<br />

Passivation<br />

Silicon Substrate<br />

Wires, Ground Plane, Plugs<br />

Oxide<br />

Passivation<br />

Wire 2<br />

Ground Plane<br />

Figure 4-4. Notional cross-section of the superconductive IC chip fabrication process illustrating salient features of an advanced process,<br />

which includes four interconnect levels, planarization, and plugs.<br />

The leap to gate densities and feature sizes needed for petaflops cannot be achieved in a single step. Sequential<br />

improvements will be needed, commensurate with the funding available for the process tools and facilities.<br />

Semiconductor technology has scaled by a factor of 0.7x in feature size and 2.5x in gate density for each generation,<br />

each of which has taken about three years and a substantial capital investment. However, much of the delay in<br />

advancing semiconductor IC chip technology was due to the lack of advanced process tools, especially in the area<br />

of photolithography. The panel expects to achieve 0.8 µm junction sizes in the next generation, because the tools<br />

and methodologies are already available. In fact, NGST, in collaboration with JPL, demonstrated a 0.8 µm junctionbased<br />

circuit fabrication process and was on the way to adopting it as standard when its Nb foundry closed in 2004.<br />

Further reduction in feature size and other process improvements will occur in subsequent generations.<br />

4.5.2 IC CHIP MANUFACTURE – DEVICE AND CIRCUIT SPEED<br />

Wire 1<br />

RSFQ gate speed is ultimately limited by the temporal width of the quantized pulses. For junctions with critical<br />

current I c and resistance R, this width is proportional to Φ 0/I cR, where Φ 0=2.07mV-ps is the superconducting flux<br />

quantum. The maximum operating frequency of the simplest RSFQ gate, a static divider , is f 0 =I cR/Φ 0. Maximum<br />

speed requires near-critical junction damping, with 2πf 0RC ~ 1, where C is the junction capacitance. Then f 0 =<br />

(J c/2πΦ 0C’) 1/2 , where J c and C’ are the critical current density and specific capacitance, respectively. These parameters<br />

depend only on the thickness of the tunnel barrier. Because C’ varies only weakly with barrier thickness, while J c varies<br />

exponentially, f 0 is approximately proportional to J c 1/2 .<br />

Plug<br />

85

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