Laboratory

TOBB ETU Superconducting Electronics Laboratory (SEL) was established in 2009 in the main building of the university. After the Technology Center was opened, SEL has moved to laboratories 103 and 104 where the group designs and tests the fabricated chips respectively. Currently the main research areas of ETU SEL include the development of single flux quantum integrated circuits, related design tools, systems based on superconducting radiation and magnetic field detectors.

ETU SEL has the capability to design and test complicated / sensitive SFQ chips under a shielded environment. Design Laboratory consists of Cadence, Sonnet Suite, Matlab and related simulation and modeling tools.

ETU SEL infrastructure allows us to test the chips in a Faraday cage at 4.2 Kelvin temperatures up to 2 Gbps data rates in 40 parallel lines. Cryo-compatible packaging and optical defect analysis is done by a wire bonder and an optical microscope in a class-10000 clean area.

Recent additions of a NIR laser with 20 GHz modulation frequency and 3-axis nano-positioner in the closed cycle refrigerator system allows us to test cryogenic detectors of dimensions up to 5mm×5mm with less than 1 um spatial resolution.

Some of the activities of the ETU SEL may be listed as the following:

• Development of an Arithmetic – Logic Unit with 25 GHz clock frequency and 2mW power consumption.
• Development of cryogenic detector read-out front-end circuits
• Development of an SFQ circuit optimizer and timing analysis tools
• Development of an analog to digital converter up to 10s of GHz sampling frequencies.
• Development of a monolithic imaging matrix by using standard foundry processes.
• Development of SQUID based magnetic field detector applications.