29.3 A Cryo-CMOS Receiver with 15K Noise Temperature Achieving 9.8dB SNR in 10μs Integration Time for Spin Qubit Readout

Continuous rounds of quantum error correction (QEC) are essential to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computers (QCs). In each QEC cycle, thousands of ancilla quantum bits (qubits) must be read out faster than the qubits’ decoherence time $(\gg \mathrm{T}_{2} * \sim 120 \mu \mathrm{s}$ for spin qubits). To address this urgent need, several CMOS receivers operating at cryogenic temperatures (cryo-CMOS RXs) have recently been introduced for gate-based [1] and RF reflectometry [2] readout of spin qubits, as well as transmons’ dispersive readout [3]. However, they have a few shortcomings. First, due to the temperature-independent shot noise of transistors in nanometer CMOS technology [4], their measured noise temperature $(\mathrm{T}_{{\mathrm {N}}})$ is limited to 40K, thus degrading qubit readout fidelity. Second, due to their large T
N
, prior art showed either only the electrical performance of their chips by applying a relatively large (i.e., -85dBm [2]) modulated signal directly to the RX input [2, 3] or offered limited qubit measurements by exploiting a HEMT amplifier prior to the RX [1]. Those issues hinder future monolithic integration between solid-state qubits and readout electronics. This work advances the prior art by (1) introducing a wideband passive amplification circuit at the RX front-end to minimize the shot noise contribution of the active devices, lowering prior art T
N
by $\sim 2.7\mathrm{x}$; (2) demonstrating the RX performance in an RF-reflectometry qubit readout scheme without using off-the-shelf LNA prior to the RX.