Optical pulse-drive and on-chip power splitter for the pulse-driven AC Josephson Voltage Standard

The pulse-driven Josephson Voltage Standard, also called Josephson Arbitrary Waveform Synthesizer (JAWS) is already well established for different applications in AC voltage metrology. To further increase the output voltage towards 10 V and to reduce the complexity of the JAWS systems we investigated two different approaches, which finally can be combined. One approach is to integrate an optimized on-chip power splitter to reduce the number of high-frequency (HF) channels from room temperature down to 4 K. A pulse pattern generator with less HF outputs will directly reduce the complexity and costs of a JAWS system. The second approach is to use an optical pulse-drive implementing cold photodiodes close to the JAWS chip. The use of optical fiber will have two main advantages: the optical fibers will reduce the high frequency noise and will enable an easy splitting into parallel optical channels. We will present first results with both approaches.