Improved Transmission Line Parameter Calculation through TCAD Process Modeling for Superconductor Integrated Circuit Interconnects

The Florida Object-Oriented Device, Process and Reliability Simulator (FLOOXS) technology computer-aided design process modeling tools developed at the University of Florida have been adapted under the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity SuperTools program to support the MIT Lincoln Laboratory SFQ5ee fabrication process. We use FLOOXS to build meshed models of passive transmission lines from superconductor integrated circuit layouts. We have previously developed a numerical solver that extracts transmission line parameters from the meshed model. In this work, we convert a layout slice to FLOOXS inputs, generate two-dimensional meshes of cross-sectional geometries from simulated process steps, and then extract the transmission line parameters from the meshes. Results are shown compared against the results for simplified transmission lines that do not utilize process modeling. The results confirm that process modeling alters the extracted parameter values and suggest that process modeling will become more important as cell density of superconducting electronics increases. We conclude with a discussion on the necessity of process modeling for high-quality parameter extraction.