A Superconducting Nanowire Binary Shift Register

Abstract

We present a design for a superconducting nanowire binary shift register, which stores digital states in the form of circulating supercurrents in high-kinetic-inductance loops. Adjacent superconducting loops are connected with nanocryotrons, three terminal electrothermal switches, and fed with an alternating two-phase clock to synchronously transfer the digital state between the loops. A two-loop serial-input shift register was fabricated with thin-film NbN and achieved a bit error rate less than $10^{-4}$, operating at a maximum clock frequency of $83\mathrm{MHz}$ and in an out-of-plane magnetic field up to $6\mathrm{mT}$. A shift register based on this technology offers an integrated solution for low-power readout of superconducting nanowire single photon detector arrays, and is capable of interfacing directly with room-temperature electronics and operating unshielded in high magnetic field environments.

arXiv commentThe following article has been published in Applied Physics Letters issue 122. 10 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (6)

• A Single-Photon Imager Based on Microwave Plasmonic Superconducting Nanowire
• A kilopixel array of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors
• A superconducting-nanowire 3-terminal electronic device
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