Jitter Sensitivity Analysis of the Superconducting Josephson Arbitrary Waveform Synthesizer

Published

November 4, 2018

Author(s)

Christine A. Donnelly, Justus Brevik, Paul Dresselhaus, Pete Hopkins, Samuel P. Benz

Abstract

We present the first jitter sensitivity analysis of a superconducting voltage reference waveform synthesizer with fundamentally accurate output pulses. Successful deployment of a reference waveform source at microwave frequencies will represent a new paradigm for radio frequency metrology. The programmable waveform synthesizer considered in this paper contains a 1.5 bit delta-sigma digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with a sampling frequency of 28 GHz. We quantify the impact of random and deterministic output pulse position jitter (PPJ) on: 1) the amplitude accuracy of the output fundamental tone and 2) the in-band signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR). The superconducting DAC features a complete lack of output pulsewidth jitter, and random PPJ up to 200 fs rms has a negligible impact on accuracy and SNDR for synthesized tones up to 1 GHz. However, application of nonzero dc bias current is shown to produce deterministic PPJ of up to 5 ps, which, in turn, is shown to degrade the in-band SNDR by 30 dB at 1 GHz unless eliminated with techniques discussed in this paper. We verify the predicted effects of random and deterministic PPJ with simulations in the range of 100 kHz-1 GHz and with experiments in the range of 100 kHz-3 MHz.

Citation

IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control

Volume

66

Issue

11

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/TMTT.2018.2856775

Local Download

Keywords

Josephson junctions, superconductivity, random jitter, deterministic jitter

Citation

Donnelly, C. , Brevik, J. , Dresselhaus, P. , Hopkins, P. and Benz, S. (2018), Jitter Sensitivity Analysis of the Superconducting Josephson Arbitrary Waveform Synthesizer, IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/TMTT.2018.2856775, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=924760 (Accessed October 27, 2025)