| Although the research in the field of superconducting digital electronics has been conducted extensively for the last 20 years, it was concentrated mainly on the development of a viable self-sustainable technology that could outperform conventional semiconducting circuits in certain technological niches—super-fast computing on the petaflop scale, digital signal processing for tera hertz astronomy or massive parallel data conversion for mobile communication applications. Recent emergence of quantum computing has posed challenges that seem to be unsurmountable with traditional approaches. With many theoretical advances made within last five years, several experimental approaches, ranging from cavity-trapped ions to exotic nuclear spin systems, has been suggested to realize quantum computation. One of these approaches makes use of quantanization of magnetic field flux in superconducting loops that serve as qubit - quantum bit, a basic element of a quantum computer.; In order to control such loops without disturbing their quantum states and also to perform measurements on the time scales faster than the time of decoherence of the quantum states a circuitry based on Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) logic family has been proposed. This thesis describes not only the development of elements of this circuitry but also describes new approaches that have been developed to enable non-destructive coupling of RSFQ circuits with a qubit and to characterize superconducting elements that RSFQ circuitry is built of. An accurate characterization becomes to be of the utmost importance due to requirements on the control of field potential of a qubit. |
