Recent advances and new directions in superconductor electronic design automation tools
The successful completion of the IARPA SuperTools project, which significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in superconductor electronic (SCE) design automation (EDA) tools, enabled SCE designers to synthesize and verify complex circuits such as 64-bit RISC processors. Advances under SuperTools included technology computer-aided design (TCAD), logic and clock synthesis, place-and-route and compact model extraction directly from layouts. A recent DARPA project on homomorphic encryption with SCE circuits demanded improvements in high-level synthesis, place-and-route and timing extraction tools. New lumped-element transmission line models were introduced to simulation tools to handle not just reflections, but also cross-coupling, dispersion and loss on inter-gate transmission lines in very large digital systems. Despite the maturity of large-scale digital circuit design and analysis tools, recent developments in the field have exposed a need to add EDA capabilities for superconductor quantum computing (SQC) design, analysis and verification. SQC end-user demand for tools that model and process flux trapping, vortex displacement, noise, high-precision extraction of weak magnetic coupling, and microwave frequency analysis for resonance and impedance has driven new directions in tool development. In this presentation, we discuss EDA advances post-SuperTools, including the new research and development efforts demanded by SQC applications.