A quantum device driven by an on-chip CMOS ring oscillator

Abstract

We present the co-integration of a ring-oscillator based CMOS circuit purposely designed to drive RF signals onto the gates of a single-electron device. It is fabricated on 300 mm wafers with the nanowire silicon-on-insulator technology and operated at cryogenic temperatures. Using the same technology for both the classical circuit and the quantum device is a unique opportunity which is implemented by simply changing the width of the field-effect transistors. While 25 nm widths yield devices behaving as quantum devices, 1μm relaxed widths guarantee a safe operation of the CMOS circuit since its components behave as regular Field-Effect transistors. We demonstrate the operation of the circuit at low temperature and observed the generation of DC currents in the absence of any applied DC bias. The generated DC current can be well explained in the framework of a rectification model [8]. The successful operation of such a co-integrated circuit can be very promising for future integration of quantum nanoelectronic devices.