  Josephson tunnel junctions form the basis for various superconducting
electronic devices. For this reason, enormous efforts are routinely taken to
establish and later on maintain a scalable and reproducible wafer-scale
manufacturing process for high-quality Josephson junctions. Here, we present an
anodization-free fabrication process for Nb/Al-AlO$_x$/Nb cross-type Josephson
junctions that requires only a small number of process steps and that is
intrinsically compatible with wafer-scale fabrication. We show that the
fabricated junctions are of very high-quality and, compared to other junction
types, exhibit not only a significantly reduced capacitance but also an almost
rectangular critical current density profile. Our process hence enables the
usage of low capacitance Josephson junctions for superconducting electronic
devices such as ultra-low noise dc-SQUIDs, microwave SQUID multiplexers based
on non-hysteretic rf-SQUIDs and RFSQ circuits.
