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As this research is a personal achievement with no company-related information, and there is no financial support for this paper from Qualcomm Technologies Inc [...]

HYPRES is developing a prototype digital system comprising a Nb RSFQ analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and SiGe amplifiers on a commercial two-stage cryocooler. This involves the detailed thermal, electrical, and mechanical design of the ADC chip mount, input/output (I/O) cables, and electromagnetic shielding. Our objective is to minimize the heat load on the second (4 K) stage of the cryocooler, in order to ensure stable ADC operation. The design incorporates thermal radiation shields and magnetic shielding for the RSFQ circuit. For the I/O cables, the thermal design must be balanced against the acceptable attenuation of RF lines and resistance of DC bias lines. SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) signal conditioning circuits, placed on the first (60 K) stage of the cryocooler, will amplify the mV-level ADC outputs to V-level (e.g., ECL) outputs for seamless transition to room-temperature electronics. Cooling these HBT circuits lowers noise and improves their high-frequency performance. Demonstration of this prototype should lead the way to commercialization of high-speed digital superconducting systems, for such applications as wireless communication, radars, and switching networks.

An 8-phase 20 GHz PLL has been designed for a serial transceiver. The PLL has a wide locking range from 10 GHz to 20 GHz with a phase noise of -112 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset. The PLL uses a four-stage ring oscillator that has a wide tuning range with a feedforward interpolation topology for coarse frequency tuning and a varactor diode load capacitance variation for fine frequency tuning. The PLL is fabricated in 0.13-mum SiGe BiCMOS technology.

A52-Gb/s 16:1 quarter-rate clocking transmitter for high-speed serial data transmission is designed to utilise 0.13-mum SiGe bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (BiCMOS) technology. The quarter-rate transmitter consists of a 16:1 multiplexer (MUX), a voltage-controlled ring oscillator, a phase-locked loop (PLL), a pseudorandom data generator and an output amplifier. The voltage-controlled ring oscillator has a wide tuning range from 11 to 22 GHz with feedforward loop and delay interpolation. A continuous model of a third-order PLL is developed and used to optimise loop filter parameters and to estimate the PLL performance in a simulation. The PLL achieves a low phase noise of -124.6 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. The 16:1 MUX features quarter-rate clock multiplexing with multi-phase voltage-controlled oscillator clocks. In the design of a 16:1 MUX, an edge-channelling 4:1 MUX is used to alleviate a duty cycle and a jitter problem.