We investigate die-level and wafer-scale uniformity of Dolan-bridge and bridgeless Manhattan Josephson junctions, using multiple substrates with and without through-silicon vias (TSVs).Dolan junctions fabricated on planar substrates have the highest yield and lowest room-temperature conductance spread, equivalent to ~100 MHz in transmon frequency. In TSV-integrated substrates, Dolan junctions suffer most in both yield and disorder, making Manhattan junctions preferable. Manhattan junctions show pronounced conductance decrease from wafer centre to edge, which we qualitatively capture using a geometric model of spatially-dependent resist shadowing during junction electrode evaporation. Analysis of actual junction overlap areas using scanning electron micrographs supports the model, and further points to a remnant spatial dependence possibly due to contact resistance.
We present the use of grounding airbridge arrays to trim the frequency of microwave coplanar-waveguide (CPW) resonators post fabrication. This method is compatible with the fabricationsteps of conventional CPW airbridges and crossovers and increases device yield by allowing compensation of design and fabrication uncertainty with 100 MHz range and 10 MHz resolution. We showcase two applications in circuit QED. The first is elimination of frequency crowding between resonators intended to readout different transmons by frequency-division multiplexing. The second is frequency matching of readout and Purcell-filter resonator pairs. Combining this matching with transmon frequency trimming by laser annealing reliably achieves fast and high-fidelity readout across 17-transmon quantum processors.
Minimizing leakage from computational states is a challenge when using many-level systems like superconducting quantum circuits as qubits. We realize and extend the quantum-hardware-efficient,all-microwave leakage reduction unit (LRU) for transmons in a circuit QED architecture proposed by Battistel et al. This LRU effectively reduces leakage in the second- and third-excited transmon states with up to 99% efficacy in 220 ns, with minimum impact on the qubit subspace. As a first application in the context of quantum error correction, we demonstrate the ability of multiple simultaneous LRUs to reduce the error detection rate and to suppress leakage buildup within 1% in data and ancilla qubits over 50 cycles of a weight-2 parity measurement.