Superconductor/Semiconductor Hybrid Analog-to-Digital Converter

We have designed a superconductor-semiconductor hybrid analog-to-digital (A/D) converter and experimentally evaluated its performance at sampling frequencies up to 18.6GHz. The A/D converter consists of a superconductor front-end circuit and a semiconductor back-end circuit. The front-end circuit includes a sigma-delta modulator and an interface circuit, which is for transmitting data signal to the semiconductor back-end circuit. The semiconductor back-end circuit performs decimation filtering. The design of the modulator was modified to reduce effects of integrator leak and thermal noise on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Using the improved modulator design, we achieved a bit-accuracy close to the ideal value. The hybrid architecture enabled us to reduce the integration scale of the front-end circuit to fewer than 500 junctions. This simplicity makes feasible a circuit based on a high TC superconductor as well as on a low TC superconductor. The experimental results show that the hybrid A/D converter operated perfectly and that SNR was 84.8dB (bit accuracy-13.8bit) at a band width of 9.1MHz. This converter has the highest pertormance of all sigma-delta A/D converters.