A superconductive flash digitizer with on-chip memory

Abstract

Recording transient physical phenomena such as short electromagnetic pulses requires a very wide-band digitizer. We have successfully designed, fabricated, and tested a superconductive flash digitizer circuit using Nb trilayer technology. The digitizer consists of a 6-bit flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a set of on-chip switches to start and stop data acquisition, and a bank of acquisition shift-registers for on-chip memory. A 5-MHz clock reads the data out to room-temperature electronics for analysis. We have used this digitizer to acquire multi-GHz sine waves. We have also recorded the details of short single pulses containing both a short rise time (/spl sim/100 ps) and structure with greater than a 10 GHz instantaneous bandwidth.