The fabrication of superconducting circuits requires multiple deposition, etching, and cleaning steps, each possibly introducing material property changes and microscopic defects. In this work, we specifically investigate the process of argon milling, a potentially coherence-limiting step, using niobium and aluminum superconducting resonators as a proxy for the surface-limited behavior of qubits. We find that niobium microwave resonators exhibit an order of magnitude decrease in quality factors after surface argon milling, while aluminum resonators are resilient to the same process. Extensive analysis of the niobium surface shows no change in the suboxide composition due to argon milling, while two-tone spectroscopy measurements reveal an increase in two-level system electrical dipole moments, indicating a structurally altered niobium oxide. However, a short dry etch can fully recover the argon-milling-induced losses on niobium, offering a potential route towards state-of-the-art overlap Josephson junction qubits with niobium circuitry.

Large-scale superconducting quantum computing systems entail high-fidelity control and readout of large numbers of qubits at millikelvin temperatures, resulting in a massive input-output bottleneck. Cryo-electronics, based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, may offer a scalable and versatile solution to overcome this bottleneck. However, detrimental effects due to cross-coupling between the electronic and thermal noise generated during cryo-electronics operation and the qubits need to be avoided. Here we present an ultra-low power radio-frequency (RF) multiplexing cryo-electronics solution operating below 15 mK that allows for control and interfacing of superconducting qubits with minimal cross-coupling. We benchmark its performance by interfacing it with a superconducting qubit and observe that the qubit’s relaxation times (T1) are unaffected, while the coherence times (T2) are only minimally affected in both static and dynamic operation. Using the multiplexer, single qubit gate fidelities above 99.9%, i.e., well above the threshold for surface-code based quantum error-correction, can be achieved with appropriate thermal filtering. In addition, we demonstrate the capability of time-division-multiplexed qubit control by dynamically windowing calibrated qubit control pulses. Our results show that cryo-CMOS multiplexers could be used to significantly reduce the wiring resources for large-scale qubit device characterization, large-scale quantum processor control and quantum error correction protocols.