Properties of asymmetric high critical temperature dc SQUIDs

Asymmetries between the two Josephson junctions of a dc-SQUID have always been considered undesirable spurious effects, responsible for the degradation of the device performance. However, it was recently demonstrated that a suitable choice of the asymmetric configuration can lead to magnetic flux noise values lower than symmetric ones. The numerical analysis was performed by using parameters typical of low-Tc SQUIDs, operating at the liquid helium temperature. In this paper, the analysis has been extended to high critical temperature dc SQUIDs, operating at the liquid nitrogen temperature. Also in this case, asymmetric SQUIDs show the best performance in terms of both flux to voltage transfer coefficient V/sub /spl Phi// and magnetic flux noise S/sub /spl Phi//. In order to optimize the device performance, the dependence of SQUID properties on damping resistance and normalized SQUID inductance has been computed for both symmetric and asymmetric configurations.