A Compact Frequency Comb Generator for Large-Format Superconducting Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors

MKIDs are sensitive superconducting detectors that shift the phase of resonant frequencies in response to photon strikes. A large-format array with several hundreds of thousands of resonators is required for large-scale submillimeter wave observations in space, but it encounters multiple challenges, the biggest of which is the absence of compact, energy-efficient, and radiation-tolerant readout solutions. Of multiple functions in the MKID readout, the new frequency comb generator is presented in this paper, featuring the low on-chip memory requirement while promising the relaxed frequency resolution in the readout, and enabling the ASIC implementation of a compact, energy-efficient frequency comb generation solution for large-format MKIDs. The proposed comb generator achieved a 128 times reduction in the on-chip memory requirement and 80 times tone information compression. The proposed comb generation method was verified through simulation using MATLAB/Simulink.