Apollo cryogenic switches are now available to order

Measuring devices at cryogenic temperatures has historically meant one signal path per device, running from room temperature down to the cold stage, so wiring, heat load and instrument count all grow with the number of devices under test. That caps how much can be measured in a single cooldown, and because a cooldown takes days, the real cost of cryogenic characterisation is set by how many samples fit into one cold cycle rather than by the measurement itself.

Apollo moves the routing inside the cryostat. The part that makes it scale is serial control: a single bus of eight low-voltage DC lines addresses a chain of hundreds of switches, so adding switches does not add control lines. More devices, or larger samples, can therefore be reached in one cooldown without rebuilding the wiring tree or adding thermal load in proportion, which reduces both the cost per measured device and the number of cooldowns a characterisation campaign requires.

Three variants are available now, each aimed at a different point in the signal chain. Apollo BB handles flux bias and DC routing from DC to 2 GHz at under 3 ohms series resistance. Apollo RF LP is intended for qubit and device measurement at the mixing chamber, where dissipation of under 150 nW matters more than bandwidth. Apollo RF HP covers 0.1 to 20 GHz with better than 60 dB isolation, for component and infrastructure testing where signal integrity is the binding constraint. All three use SMA connectors, and higher density versions are in development.

Each variant can be supplied with a control box, Python drivers, and adapters for common cryogenic systems, so getting started is a matter of mounting the hardware and connecting the cables. Cryogenic data sheet measurements have been performed independently by TNO, and the first Apollo units are already installed and in use with customers, whose results have given us the confidence to open availability more broadly. Headline specifications for each variant are on the product pages, and full datasheets are available on request from info@frostbyte.nl.

Apollo is the first product in a planned range of cryogenic electronics designed to address the scaling problems quantum technologies will face in the years to come.