A 10 V programmable Josephson voltage standard circuit with a maximum output voltage of 20 V

Abstract

A 10 V programmable Josephson voltage standard (PJVS) circuit with a maximum output voltage of 20 V and a microwave bias of 18.5 GHz was designed and fabricated. Although an attempt was made to improve the fabrication yield for the 10 V PJVS circuit, it was not sufficiently large to reproducibly fabricate a perfect chip without any defects. The redundant arrays were additionally integrated to increase the maximum output voltage, which contributed to an increase in the number of available chips under the limited fabrication yield. Fortunately, most of the defective arrays had a zeroth Shapiro step, while the first step was very small or zero. If the array was not dc biased, it did not generate any voltage, because it worked as a superconductive wiring. In this case, the maximum output voltage became smaller than that of a perfect chip, but it functioned as a 10 V PJVS, due to the back-up arrays.