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Inductance of Circuit Structures for MIT LL Superconductor Electronics Fabrication Process with 8 Niobium Layers

Inductance of superconducting thin-film inductors and structures with linewidth down to 250 nm has been experimentally evaluated. The inductors include various striplines and microstrips, their 90-degree bends and meanders, interlayer vias, etc., typically used in superconducting digital circuits. The circuits have been fabricated by a fully planarized process with 8 niobium layers, developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory for very-large-scale superconducting integrated circuits. Excellent run-to-run reproducibility and inductance uniformity of better than 1% across 200-mm wafers have been found. It has been found that the inductance per unit length of stripline and microstrip line inductors continues to grow as the inductor linewidth is reduced deep into the submicron range to the widths comparable to the film thickness and magnetic field penetration depth. It is shown that the linewidth reduction does not lead to widening of the parameter spread due to diminishing sensitivity of the inductance to the linewidth and dielectric thickness. The experimental results were compared with numeric inductance extraction using commercial software and freeware, and a good agreement was found for 3-D inductance extractors. Methods of further miniaturization of circuit inductors for achieving circuit densities > 10^6 Josephson junctions per cm^2 are discussed.