Superconducting parametric amplifiers have been developed for fast and high
fidelity single shot readout of superconducting qubits. The nonliniarity re-
quired for those amplifiers is either based on various types of Josephson
junctions or high kinetic inductance materials. The Andersen Lab currently
develops a novel type of superconducting parametric amplifiers based on
superconducting-semiconducting hybrid nanowires, which will allow for in-
situ tuning of the amplifier characteristics with a gate voltage.
To prepare for the required performance tests of nanowire-based para-
metric amplifiers, we characterize a commercially available travelling wave
parametric amplifier in terms of 5 figures of merit: gain, bandwidth, satu-
ration power, noise temperature and quantum efficiency. We find a state of
the art amplifier performances, but also detect several hardware problems
in the measurement setup, which must be solved prior to further test. The
method implemented here can be generalized to the characterization of all
types superconducting parametric amplifiers.