The workshop covers all aspects of electronic systems, components and instrumentation for particle and astro-particle physics such as: electronics for particle detection, triggering, data-acquisition systems, accelerator and beam instrumentation.
Operational experience in electronic systems and R&D in electronics for LHC, High Luminosity LHC, FAIR, neutrino facilities and other present or future accelerator projects are the major focus of the workshop.
The purpose of the workshop is:
- Present original concepts and results of research and development for electronics relevant to particle physics experiments as well as accelerator and beam instrumentation at future facilities;
- Review the status of electronics for running experiments and accelerators;
- Identify and encourage common efforts for the development of electronics;
- Promote information exchange and collaboration in the relevant engineering and physics communities.
The main topics of the workshop will be recent research and developments in the following areas:
- Highly integrated detectors and electronics;
- Custom Analogue and Digital Circuits;
- Programmable Digital Logic Applications and Verification;
- Optoelectronic Data Transfer and Control;
- Packaging and Interconnect Technologies;
- Radiation and Magnetic Field Tolerant Systems;
- Testing and Reliability;
- Power Management and Conversion;
- Grounding and Shielding;
- Design Tools and Methods.
The workshop programme will include invited plenary talks, sessions for oral presentations, poster presentations and a tutorial on "Digital Verification for FPGA and ASIC Designers".
Agenda overview:
October 2, until 10:00, Registration
October 2, 10:00-11:50, Plenary presentations (organised by the local organising committee)
October 2 afternoon, October 3-5 all day and October 6 9:00-11:40, scientific program in plenary, parallel and poster sessions
October 2, evening, Welcome reception in conference hotel
October 4, afternoon, social activity
October 5, evening, conference dinner
October 6, 14:00-17:00, tutorial: Digital Verification for FPGA and ASIC Designers (https://indico.cern.ch/event/1255624/page/28776-training-tutorial, registration required)
Information about registration to the workshop and local organisation is available at: https://twepp23.ca.infn.it/
Authors are invited to submit abstracts and summaries describing original developments and new contributions, including recent progress, in the workshop topic areas.
Abstracts (max. 100 words long) and summaries (max. 500 words long) along an optional file containing diagrams or plots must be submitted through the Integrated Digital Conference tool at https://indico.cern.ch/e/twepp2023.
The summary will be the basis for paper selection. The summary should describe quantitative specifications of the work, challenges, implementation and results.
Submissions without comprehensive summaries will not be considered. Submissions directly from the presenters are encouraged. Summaries should clearly describe the aspects of the work relevant to the topics of TWEPP. Standard summaries targeted to physics or detector instrumentation conferences might need to be updated accordingly.
The submission deadline is 30 April 2023.
*** No extensions are foreseen ***
Abstracts will be made available at the time of the workshop and will include all contributions selected for either oral or poster presentation.
The proceedings of the workshop will be published in the peer-reviewed journal of Instrumentation, JINST.
Information concerning the workshop scientific programme and submissions is available at: https://indico.cern.ch/e/twepp2023
Enquiries can be directed to the Workshop Secretariat, by email at twepp@cern.ch
Local organisation information is be available on https://twepp23.ca.infn.it/
Enquiries concerning the local organisation can be directed to the local organisation committee, by email at twepp2023@ca.infn.it
Scientific organisation
A. Kluge (CERN, CH, Chair)
J. Alme (UiB, NO)
C. F. Bedoya (CIEMAT, ES)
A. Boccardi (CERN, CH)
J.P. Cachemiche (CPPM–IN2P3, FR)
A. Cardini (INFN, IT)
H. Chen (BNL, US)
S. Danzeca (CERN, CH)
D. Gascon (ICCUB, ES)
M. French (RAL, UK)
P. Gui (SMU, US)
M. Hansen (CERN, CH)
C. G. Hu (IPHC-IN2P3, FR)
C. Joram (CERN, CH)
A. Lai (INFN, IT)
A. Ricci (CERN, CH, Secretary)
A. Rivetti (INFN, IT)
W. Snoeys (CERN, CH)
F. Vasey (CERN, CH)
K. Wyllie (CERN, CH)
Organised by INFN, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, sezione di Cagliari and Università degli Studi di Cagliari with support from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Einstein Telescope is the future European Laboratory for gravitational waves. The discovery of gravitational waves (GW), in 2015, 100 years after the publication of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, was soon followed, in 2017, by the assignment of the Nobel prize for physics to three scientists of the LIGO-VIRGO collaboration. LIGO in the USA and VIRGO in Italy are, at present, the unique detectors worldwide capable to observe the GW signals. In 2017 with a coordinated effort of LIGO-VIRGO and a network of Telescopes on earth and in the space the gravitational waves signal from a neutron star collision was detected and combined with its electromagnetic counterpart, opening the era of multi messenger astronomy.
This provided the substantial momentum which led to the proposal of a third generation GW detector in Europe. In July 2021 Einstein Telescope was officially approved and inserted in the ESFRI program. The detector will substantially improve the current ones in sensitivity and in background suppression. In the present configuration it is designed as a triangle, underground, of 10 km per side, but a twin L shape system, with same concept of the LIGO detector is under consideration, There are presently two site candidates, one in Italy, in Sardinia, and one in the Netherlands, in the Limburg region.
This presentation will cover both the genesis of the project and the principles of GW detection, its technological challenges and an overview of the present status and future schedule.
Sardinia has an age old history told by a great cultural heritage and the nuraghi are probably the most important archaeological and cultural evidence. These majestic stone towers, built in the second millennium B.C., have represented a long term landscape marker and a symbolic reference point for Sardinian communities. Extraordinary ancient architects designed and built at least 7000 monumental buildings all over the island, big stone towers that were symble and centre of life of a great civilization. Sardinia territory still preserves many other archaeological evidences of this great people life, such as monumental tombs (giant's tombs), temples as sacred wells, sanctuaries, villages and an important bronze artifact production (axes, swords, figurines, ecc.). Nuragic people controlled the whole island from North to South, but were also involved in the main sea routes and traffics of the Mediterranean sea. Nuragic finds in Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, Spain, Northern Africa show us the important role of this civilization in the Mediterranean Bronze and Iron age trades and networks.
H2GCROC is the 130nm CMOS ASIC designed to read out the SiPMs coupled to the scintillating tiles of the back hadronic sections of CMS HGCAL (High Granularity Calorimeter). Each of its 72 channels is composed of a current conveyor, a high-gain preamplifier, a shaper, and ADC to read the energy, with two discriminators connected to TDCs for time-of-arrival and time-over-threshold information, respectively. This work presents the ASIC architecture and its characterization in lab and test beam, proving good adaptability in calibration, radiation tolerance, capacity to measure SiPM SPS (single-photon-spectrum), MIP's time and energy with high resolution.
With over 6 million channels, the High Granularity Calorimeter for the CMS HL-LHC upgrade presents a unique data challenge. The ECON ASICs provide a critical stage of on-detector data compression and selection for the trigger path (ECON-T) and data acquisition path (ECON-D) of the HGCAL. The ASICs, fabricated in 65nm CMOS, are radiation tolerant (200 Mrad) with low power consumption (<2.5 mW/channel). We report the first functionality and radiation tests for the ECON-D-P1 full-functionality prototype including a comparison of single event effect (SEE) cross sections measured for different methods of triple modular redundancy.
This talk describes the characterisation and validation campaign of the prototype of the CMS Readout Chip (CROC), a 65 nm CMOS pixel readout ASIC for the CMS Inner Tracker upgrade for High Luminosity LHC. This validation campaign includes tests with single-chip and multi-chip modules, irradiation campaigns, test beams and wafer-level tests. The main results obtained in the testing of the CROC prototype will be outlined. Key improvements and fixes that have been implemented in the final version of the chip before the summer 2023 submission will be described.
A novel Data Acquisition (DAQ) system, known as Level-1 Data Scouting (L1DS), is being introduced as part of the Level-1 (L1) trigger of the CMS experiment. The L1DS system will receive the L1 intermediate primitives from the CMS Phase-2 L1 trigger on the DAQ-800 custom boards, designed for the Phase-2 central DAQ. Firmware is being developed for this purpose on the Xilinx VCU128 board, with features similar to one half of the DAQ-800, and validated in a demonstrator for LHC Run-3. This contribution describes the firmware development in view of the target design for the DAQ-800.
Accurate clock and time distribution is a key requirement for self-triggered streaming data acquisition in the CBM experiment. This distribution is handled by the Timing and Fast Control (TFC) system by clock forwarding and broadcasting the common time over latency-deterministic optical links in a hierarchical FPGA network. The point-to-point optical connections are served by the latency-optimized GBT-FPGA core, which has been developed at CERN. In the presented work, the performance of GBT-FPGA links for time and clock distribution in a scaled TFC system with multiple hops and endpoints has been investigated.
The RHIC interaction rate at sPHENIX reaches around 3 MHz in pp collisions and requires the detector readout to reject events by a factor of over 200. Critical measurements often require the analysis of particles produced at low momentum. This prohibits adopting the traditional approach, where data rates are reduced through triggering on rare high momentum probes. We propose a new approach based on real-time AI technology, adopt an FPGA-based implementation using a FELIX-712 board with the Xilinx Kintex Ultrascale FPGA, and deploy the system in the detector readout electronics loop for real-time trigger decision.
The RD53 Collaboration, established in 2013 as a joint effort between ATLAS and CMS pixel ASIC communities on 65nm CMOS technology, is now in the phase of implementing final pixel readout chips, referred to as RD53C revisions, that will be used into upgraded pixel detectors at HL-LHC. The purpose of this work is to provide a comprehensive review of most important architectural design choices, enhancements, implementation details and verification flows adopted to submit final ATLAS and CMS production chips, along with preliminary test results and measurements.
The COLUTA ASIC is an 8-channel 15-bit 40 MSPS ADC fabricated in 65 nm CMOS for the upgrade of the readout of the ATLAS LAr calorimeter for the high luminosity LHC. The ADC architecture couples a 3.5-bit Multiplying-DAC (MDAC) stage to a successive approximation register (SAR) ADC with a digital back-end that outputs sample data continuously via 640 Mbps serial LVDS. The analog performance and radiation tolerance tests and measurements of the production COLUTA ADC will be presented, along with the robotic multi-chip test setup and procedures developed for the verification of 80,000 COLUTA ADC ASICs.
The LHC upgrade requires redoing the LAr calibration system which should provide a 16-bit range signal with 1‰ accuracy while being radiation tolerant. The former operating principle is used: a precise current is stored in an inductor, when it is switched off, a pulse is generated to be injected in the readout electronics. This is achieved by two chips: the first one, in TSMC 130nm, provides the 16-bit DAC as well as the calibration management system; the second one, in XFAB 180nm, embeds switches to generate the pulses. A description of both chips and measurement results will be presented.
We present the deployment and testing of an autoencoder trained for unbiased detection of new physics signatures in the CMS Global Trigger test crate during LHC Run 3. The GT test crate is a copy of the main GT system, receiving the same input data, but whose output is not used to trigger the readout of CMS, providing a platform for thorough testing of new trigger algorithms on live data, but without interrupting data taking. We describe the integration of the DNN into the GT test crate, and the monitoring, testing, and validation of the algorithm during proton collisions.
During the LHC Run-3 the LHCb software trigger is expected to reconstruct events at an average rate of 30 MHz. In view of future runs at even higher luminosities, LHCb established a testbed for new heterogeneous computing solutions for real-time event reconstruction within the current DAQ infrastructure. The most advanced of these sois a highly-parallelized custom tracking processor (“Artificial Retina”), implemented in state of the art FPGA devices connected by fast serial links. We describe the status of the development of a life-size demonstrator system for the reconstruction of pixel tracking detectors, that will run on real data during Run-3.
The baseline architecture for the ATLAS Phase-II upgrade has a single-level hardware trigger (Level-0 Trigger) with a maximum rate of 1 MHz and 10 μs latency. A full-function Global Common Module (GCM) prototype has been designed and implemented for the core part of the Level-0 Trigger, the Global Trigger. This GCM features two of the latest Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP) devices from Xilinx, the Versal Premium VP1802, plus twenty 12-channel 25.7 Gb/s FireFly optical engines. Presented here is the design process of this full-function GCM prototype hardware, with the focus on the technology choices and simulation results.
The MOSS (Monolithic Stitched Sensor) chip is a
monolithic pixel prototype chip measuring (\qty{25.9}{cm}\times\qty{1.4
}{cm}). It was designed to explore the stitching technique,
to investigate the achievable yield and as a proof of concepts for
the sensors for the ALICE ITS3 upgrade. It was manufactured in
early 2023.
This submission will focus on the MOSS chip and on its testing. It
will give an overview of the chip and describe the system developed
to characterize it. It will report on the early experience of
testing in the laboratory and include the first experimental results.
During the next LHC Long Shutdown, the innermost three layers of the ALICE Inner Tracking System will be replaced by a new vertex detector composed of curved ultra-thin monolithic silicon sensors. The R&D initiative on monolithic sensors of the CERN Experimental Physics Department, in synergy with ALICE ITS3 upgrade project, prepared the first submission of chip designs in the TPSCo 65 nm technology, called MLR1. It contains four different test structures: CE-65, DPTS, APTS-SF and APTS-OPAMP, with different process splits and pixel designs. This work illustrates the validation of the technology in terms of pixel performance and radiation hardness.
The TaichuPix chip is a dedicated monolithic CMOS pixel sensor that is being developed for the first 6-layer silicon vertex detector prototype of the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) vertex detector R&D. Two small-scale demonstrator chips (25 mm$^2$) had been designed to optimize the in-pixel circuit and readout architecture, and to verify the radiation hardness. The positive results of the small-scale prototypes led to a submission of the first full-scale (2.6 cm × 1.6 cm) TaichuPix prototype in 2022. The design details and test results of TaichuPix prototypes and development of the readout electronics will be given.
FLX-182 is a PCIe card designed for the readout system of the ATLAS experiment for the High Luminosity phase of LHC starting in 2029. FLX-182 is responsible for decoding and transferring data from the front-ends into the host server memory, and receiving and distributing timing, trigger and control information. About six hundred FLX-182 will sustain 4.6 TB/s of total throughput at 1 MHz data rate. FLX-182 is equipped with a Xilinx Versal Prime VM1802 SoC, a PCIe Gen4x16 interface and can operate up to 24 optical links at 25 Gb/s. FLX-182 runs firmware capable of interfacing with all different subdetectors.
As part of the CMS Phase-2 upgrade, a prototype of the receiver of raw trigger data from the HGCAL endcap has been implemented using the Serenity ATCA platform. The receiver firmware was developed to test the unpacking of data from the front-end endcap trigger concentrator ASIC and measure its performance and stability. The firmware mainly consisted of unpacker blocks to decode ASIC packets, error detection mechanisms and online histogramming capability. The system was successfully used to achieve complete trigger path readout, involving several ASICs, and to test the stability of the system with online and offline monitoring.
Several physics experiments are moving towards new acquisition models. In this work implementation of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) directly on the front-end electronics has been explored, in this way is possible to free part of the computing farm's CPU resources. The work also introduces new verification techniques for verifying RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) firmware block developed at ETH, including real-time firmware simulation using Verilog Simulator. The result is a stripped down firmware version, allowing its implementation on smaller FPGAs, such as rad-hard parts.
As the complexity and costs of ASICs designed for high-energy physics experiments continue to soar, verification emerges as a crucial factor in completing projects within reasonable timelines and budgets. Recognizing the escalating significance of verification, CERN and other high-energy physics institutes have invested significantly in enhancing the rigor of this essential process. In this talk, we emphasize the critical role of verification, delve into the unique challenges posed by ASIC designs in HEP, and discuss a set of best practices aimed at enhancing verification efficiency. By improving the quality of the verification process, these practices pave the way for predictable project execution and improved product outcomes. Drawing on successful experiences from ASIC verification at CERN and lessons learned from ineffective strategies, this talk provides valuable insights for achieving successful ASIC designs in high-energy physics experiments.
ALFE2 is an ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeter (LAr) Front-End ASIC designed for the HL-LHC upgrade. ALFE2 comprises four channels of pre-amplifiers and CR-(RC)2 shapers with adjustable input impedance. ALFE2 features two separate gain outputs to provide 16-bit dynamic-range coverage and an optimum resolution for small signals. ALFE2 is characterized using a Front-End Test Board (FETB) based on a Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC and two octal-channel 16-bit high-speed ADCs. The test results indicate that ALFE2 fulfills or greatly exceeds all specifications on gain, noise, linearity, uniformity, and radiation tolerance.
4D tracking with ~10ps timing is crucial for reducing the combinatorial challenge of track reconstruction at high pileup densities, it offers completely new handles to detect and trigger on LLP and enables particle-ID capabilities at low transverse momentum. At the Muon Collider, the timing information will be essential for reduction of BIB. A high-precision TDC is a critical block necessary for enabling 4D tracking. We present the design and characterization of a 4-channel sub-10ps TDC ASIC in 28nm CMOS technology. The developed TDC is based on a novel 2D Vernier ring-oscillator structure with embedded sliding-scale technique for conversion linearity improvement.
The IGNITE project is developing solutions for the next generation of trackers at colliders. It plans to implement an integrated system module, comprising sensor, electronics, and fast readout, aimed at 4D-tracking. System pixels are required to have pitch around 50 µm and time resolution below 30 ps. In the present paper we present recent advancements on the design of a prototype ASIC, exploring several circuital solutions on the front-end side, in view of the first IGNITE ASIC, featuring a 64x64 pixel matrix, which is being completed in the coming months.
The prototyping cost in advanced technology nodes and the complexity of future detectors require the adoption of a system design approach common in industry: design space exploration through high-level architectural studies to achieve clear and optimized specifications.
This contribution proposes a configurable SystemC framework to simulate the readout chain from the front-end chips to the detector back-end. The model is transaction accurate, includes an event generator and interfaces with real physics events, and provides metrics such as readout efficiency, latency, and average queue occupancy.
This contribution details the structure of the framework and describes a case study based on Velopix2.
ALTIROC3 is the second version of the ASIC for the ATLAS High Granularity Timing Detector to read out full size LGAD sensors (15x15 pixels of 1.3mm x 1.3mm). The ASIC, designed in 130nm technology, comprises around 250k flip-flops, more than 1000 8-bit configuration registers, and several clock domains and implements different analog IP-blocks critical for digital data acquisition and processing. This contribution presents the verification approach and tools employed, including a new System Verilog verification environment based on Universal Verification methodology (UVM) for functional, power and SEE verification, complemented with formal verification for Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) and Reset analysis.
The ALICE collaboration is developing the new Inner Tracker System 3 (ITS3), a novel detector that exploits the stitching technique to construct single-die monolithic pixel sensors of up-to 266 mm x 93 mm. ITS3 requires all hits from a particle flux of 4.4 MHz/cm2 to be transmitted on-chip to one of the sensor edges. This on-chip readout is limited by a power budget of 20 mW/cm2, a readout inefficiency of <2.5×10−3 and ≤10 % dead area. The model of ITS3 on-chip readout architecture will be presented, used to optimize the data flow implementation limited by physical and power budget constraints.
We present the development of a data acquisition system dedicated to de-
tectors using the Timepix4 ASIC, developed in 65nm CMOS technology by the
Medipix4 Collaboration, as integrated front-end.
A control board is needed for system configuration and data acquisition,
up to the maximum bandwidth of 160 Gbps. To avoid the need for multiple
custom boards, we designed a system based on commercial hardware and a
user-configurable open-source firmware and software allowing for reusability and scalability of the system.
This work is concerned with the design and the characterization of front-end channels, developed in a 28 nm CMOS technology, conceived for the readout of pixel sensors in future, high-rate applications at the next generation of large particle accelerators.
Two front-end architectures are discussed. In the first one, an in-pixel flash ADC is exploited for the digitization of the signal, whereas the second one features a Time-over-Threshold (ToT) conversion. A prototype including the ADC-based front-end has been submitted and the characterization of the chip is discussed in the conference paper. Simulation results relevant to the ToT-based architecture are reported.
This work aims to describe the experimental performance of a module consisting of four Lithium-drifted Silicon (Si(Li)) detectors and their readout electronics, which is the main component of a tracker in an upcoming balloon experiment. The activity is carried out within the GAPS (General AntiParticle Spectrometer) collaboration, whose scientific objective is the indirect detection of dark matter, through the detection of antiparticles present in low-energy cosmic-rays. The balloon flight is expected from McMurdo station in Antarctica in 2024. The main object of this study is the analysis of the readout electronic performance, with particular focus on the noise.
The Level-1 trigger scouting system of the CMS experiment aims at intercepting intermediate data produced by the L1 trigger processors, before the final trigger decision.
This system can be complemented by adding the raw stream of data collected from the detector front-end, where the throughput is manageable. An implementation of the triggerless readout is realized by reading a sector of the CMS Drift Tubes detector, which has been equipped with the preproduction of Phase-2 upgrade front-end boards. A Xilinx VCU118 acts as a concentrator of the Phase-2 demonstrator lpGBT links and transmits data to a server via 100G TCP/IP.
The hfrh-buck (high frequency radiation hardened-buck) is a radiation hardened DC/DC-converter operating at a high switching frequency of 100MHz with a small air core inductor of 22nH. To ensure a high radiation dose, the circuit is designed with core transistors of a 65nm TSMC technology. By stacking the transistors of the power stage, the converter can be supplied with a voltage of up to 4.8V. Stable operation can be achieved at an output voltage of 1.2V with a maximum load current of 1A. The prototype demonstrates the ability to power parallel connected hybrid-pixel modules in the innermost layers.
A monolithic pixel sensor test chip for PANDA micro-vertex detector has been implemented in 180 nm HVCMOS technology on a high resistivity substrate. The sensor should have very high time resolution (1 ns sigma) and high dynamic range (up to 1000). The pixel electronics contains a Charge Sensitive Amplifier (CSA), a feedback circuit and two comparators. One comparator receives the fast signal and enables accurate time measurement. The other comparator receives the low pass filtered signal and is used for precise amplitude measurement. This publication presents several novel features of PANDA ASIC, its characterization and several measurement results.
We present first results obtained with a prototype 4D-tracking demonstrator, using sensors and electronics developed within the TimeSPOT project, and tested on a positive charged pion beam at CERN SPS. The setup consists of six small tracking layers in a row, having area of about 3 mm squared each, three of which equipped with 3D-trench silicon sensors and three with 3D-column diamond sensors. The six layers are then read-out by a KC705 Xilinx board on a PC. We describe the demonstrator structure and operation and illustrate results on its tracking capabilities.
We present details on the new Level-1 Global Trigger at CMS for the upcoming high-luminosity operation of the LHC. Our focus is on the newly developed firmware, which employs a bottom-up generic approach to enhance menu adaptability and accommodate the increase in upstream information. We also highlight our efficient pipelining strategy that ensures excellent routability at 480 MHz. Furthermore, we discuss the three Serenity boards for which a prototype exists, together with their current and future testing and validation endeavours.
High-speed multichannel ADCs are costly and require complex FPGA firmware to communicate with them. The Multi-Voltage Thresholding (MVT) approach can replace to some extent an external ADC with internal resources of an FPGA, thus reducing costs and complexity. The MVT approach needs only a few low-cost external components. The focus of the talk is presenting an open-source IP-Core that implements the MVT approach and simplifies implementation on a standard FPGA. The talk also provides an overview of characterization measurements and specific calibration methods. Our example application demonstrates the viability of the developed IP-Core for signal acquisition from multiple SiPMs.
A new application for monolithic pixel detectors is NASA’s AMEGO-X project [1], which is a low-orbit gamma ray observatory for multimessenger astrophysics, proposed as a 3 to 5 year mission. For the 40-layer gamma-ray telescope, which will consist of over 64000 sensors with a total area of more
than 25 m², a new low power < 2 mW/cm2 and high dynamic range 20 – 600 keV monolithic active pixel sensor with 500 um depletion thickness, named AstroPix, is currently being developed.
A full characterization of the BigRock high-speed, low-power analog front end (AFE) will be presented. The BigRock AFE previously described in [1] has been refined in a second generation testbed ASIC, Pebbles. The AFE utilizes a current-mode signal path that has been designed for 4D tracking applications with precision time resolution of order 50 ps. The preamplifier concept is based on a prior art current-feedback CMOS topology in [2]. An on-chip test bench comprised of a variable injection circuit and high-resolution TDC measures the AFE timing resolution. An array of integrated load capacitors and IO IPs enhance the characterization capability.
In preparation for the High-Luminosity era of the LHC, the CMS experiment will replace the existing calorimeter endcaps with a novel device - the High Granularity Calorimeter (HGCAL), having around six million readout channels. The electronics system for this upgrade project is highly specialised and complex, involving multiple layers of data transfer, so testing must be carefully planned. The strategy has been to split the efforts between vertical (start-to-end) and horizontal (parallelisation) test systems. An important milestone for the former has been the development and operation of test systems to prototype one vertical slice of the future endcap electronics system.
The development of the CMS Barrel Calorimeter Processor (BCP) for the high-luminosity LHC poses a challenge due to strict power requirements. To minimize the risk of performance degradations or component damage, a project-specific and inexpensive evaluation board has been designed with multiple DC power circuits to safely test and evaluate them outside of the expensive BCP. The planned tests will verify several operating parameters of the power circuits, including output voltage, ripple voltage, and transient load. We will report on the results of these tests along with any roadblocks, their solutions, and lessons learned from this investigation.
University of Bergen is involved in developing two calorimeters: (1) the pixel section of the Electromagnetic Forward Calorimeter (FoCal-E) for the ALICE Upgrade and (2) the Digital Tracking Calorimeter (DTC) for the proton Computed Tomography (pCT) prototype. Both designs utilize the ALPIDE sensors which are connected to aluminum-polyimide flexible cables applying Single-point Tape Automated Bonding (SpTAB). This contribution describes the development of the first multi-chip string prototypes, their performance, and the characterization of the high-speed links of the front-end electronics and towards the readout. Moreover, we present the experience with the prototypes both in the laboratory and test beam setups.
The paper describes a new figure of merit reachable in term of very low power dissipation for a 12 bit, 40MS/s Analog to Digital Converter in a CMOS 65nm process with 1V power supply. A differential time interleaved successive approximations register architecture is used. Each individual ADC channel is optimized regarding power consumption hence parallelizing 28 ADC channels in an analog memory like method, the total power consumption is only 280µW including all the reference voltage drivers and the digital sections. The total layout area of this converter is 0.87 mm2. Crosstalk simulations results will be discussed regarding channel-to-channel discrepancies.
The Belle II collaboration has initiated a program to upgrade its detector in order to address the challenges set by the increase of the SuperKEKB collider luminosity, targeting 6x1035 cm²s-1. A monolithic CMOS pixel sensor named OBELIX (Optimized BELLe II pIXel) is proposed to equip 5 detection layers upgrading the current vertex detector. Based on the existing TJ-Monopix2, OBELIX is currently designed in a CMOS 180 nm process. This new sensor introduces an extended pixel matrix, power regulators, fast hitOR information as inputs to the trigger system and a powerful readout logic matching the Belle II requirements.
We present the architectural design, prototype fabrication and and first results for the High Pitch digitizer System-on-Chip (HPSoC). The HPSoC is a high channel density and scalable waveform digitization ASIC with an embedded interface to advanced high-speed sensor arrays such as e.g. AC-LGADs. The chip is being fabricated in 65nm technology and targets the following features: picosecond-level timing resolution; 10 Gs/s waveform digitization rate to allow pulse shape discrimination; moderate data buffering (256 samples/chnl); autonomous chip triggering, readout control, calibration and storage virtualization; on-chip feature extraction and multi-channel data fusion.
In this talk we report the R&D program underway at CCNU to develop a pixel chip for the readout of GEM detectors appropriate for use in the CSR external-target experiment (CEE) at HIRFL for beam monitoring. The chip offers simultaneous Time over Threshold (ToT) and Time of Arrival (ToA) measurements, with an event-driven readout mode. The chips were tested with injected pulses and a Fe-ion beam of 350 MeV/u, coupled with single GEM. The position resolution, rate capability and reconstruction efficiency for the beam particles were characterized.
The CoRDIA project aims to develop an X-ray imager capable of continuous operation in excess of 100 kframe/s. The goal is to provide a suitable instrument for Photon Science experiments at diffraction-limited Synchrotron Rings and Free Electron Lasers considering Continuous Wave operation.
Individual circuit blocks (adaptive-gain amplifier, analog-to-digital converter) were produced using a 65nm process and characterized, confirming expected performances.
A prototype has been designed, assembling said blocks in a pipelined, modular structure that can be replicated in a 2D pixel array.
Manufacturing is expected in spring 2023. Design architecture, expected performances and first test results will be reported.
Upcoming upgrade of the ALICE Inner Tracking System (ITS3) foresees the use of wafer-scale MAPs bent into a cylindrical shape. Test beams employing the current ALICE Alpide chips, bent to foreseen ITS3 radii, showed that MAPs remain fully functional. However, some electrical effects, like (PS) power supply current changes and voltage shifts, were observed. The results suggest that these are caused by “piezo resistive effect” and FET threshold shifts, probably occurring in the pixel transistors. Some design architectures showed to be less susceptible to these effects and detailed investigations could help in design optimization. This contribution discusses latest test results.
This paper introduces a prototype of a GaN FET based 200 W DC-DC converter. Its design has been carried out to ensure optimal efficiency and minimal electromagnetic interference (EMI) issues that are commonly associated with the high switching frequency converters. To achieve this, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) techniques have been used to enhance the control at high switching speed, and ANSYS HFSS-SiWave models have been developed to assess noise emissions based on the parasitic elements of PCB layout. Prototypes performance have been evaluated through extensive testing. This work offers insight into the potential of this technology in future physics detectors.
The High Granularity Timing Detector (HGTD) is an ATLAS Phase II upgrade project, the goal of which is to provide accurate time measurements for tracks to mitigate pile-up effect. DC/DC converters, BPOL12V, are implemented in the Peripheral Electronic Boards (PEB) and used to generate voltages for a bunch of ASICs. Due to the working environment constraints of HGTD, the BPOL12V will be operated in low temperature and under magnetic field. Therefore, it is essential to perform a comprehensive study of BPOL12V under different operation conditions. This report will present such study, including the BPOL12V efficiency, ripple and other.
Data bandwidth, timing resolution and resource utilization in readouts of radiation detectors are constantly challenged. Event driven solutions are pushing against well-trenched framed solutions. The idea for an asynchronous readout architecture called EDWARD (Event-Driven With Access and Reset Decoder) was presented at the TWEPP 2021 conference. Here we show the progress of our work which resulted in two chip prototypes. The first one is a full device with analog pixel circuitry suited for full-field fluorescence imaging, and the second one contains digital pulse generators with Poisson-exponential distribution in each pixel for extraction of the performance matrix of EDWARD alone.
In this poster we present our approach to design power supplies that are resilient to magnetic field that can reach up to 1 T, we will illustrate the engineering challenge to have a power supply that can safely operate in radiation and magnetic fields. We will summarize the test we have performed starting from basic components like inductors, then sub-parts and complete modules. We will illustrate the use case of the BRIC1 used by ATLAS-NSW as DC-DC intermediate converter stage and summarize its performance.
FPGA prototyping enables hardware acceleration for ASIC verification. Cadence Protium, an FPGA based platform, enables ASIC designers to prototype their RTL code in an easy and automatically way. As the RTL codes stay untouched during the process, the Protium provides a reliable model of the ASIC for early developments of DAQ and control systems. Protium advanced Blackbox flow allows in addition using external FPGA IP and running parts of the design at much higher speeds than what can be achieved by standard Protium flow. Its role in the validation of MIMOSIS2, an ASIC developed for CBM experiment, will be presented.
In this presentation, we discuss a multi-channel radiation-tolerant and magnetic field-compatible humidity monitoring system developed for the needs of the CMS inner cold sub-detectors. The results of sensor irradiation tests, the tests conducted at different negative temperatures, and tests performed in the strong magnetic field are presented. Furthermore, a multi-channel readout unit has been designed, evaluated, and discussed. The proposed readout unit effectively nullifies both internal sensor parasitic effects and parasitic effects coming from long cables connecting the sensor to the readout electronics.
The High-Luminosity phase of the CERN Large Hadron Collider will pose new challenges for the detectors. The Electromagnetic Calorimeter (ECAL) of the CMS experiment will be equipped with a completely new readout electronics to cope with increase in the number of pp collisions per bunch crossing, as high as 200, and higher noise induced by radiation. Two on-beam vertical integration tests were performed at the CERN H4 facility using near-final components, installed in an ECAL Supermodule identical to the 36 Supermodules the barrel is made of. The data acquisition chain and the results of the test beam will be presented.
RDMA communication is an efficient choice for many applications, such as data acquisition systems, data center networking and any other networking application where high bandwidth and low latency are necessary. RDMA can be implemented using a large array of options which need to be tailored to the needed use case in order to get optimal results. Aspects such as the effects of using multiple simultaneous connections, using various transport functions such as RDMA Write and RDMA Send and communication models such as sending individual bursts or continuous streams of data will be investigated for implementing RDMA on FPGA devices.
A new Forward Calorimeter (FoCal) system has been proposed as part of the ALICE upgrades planned for LHC Run 4 which features a Si+W electromagnetic calorimeter. A first tower prototype corresponding to 1/5 of the nominal module of the electromagnetic calorimeter has been built in 2022. It is composed of 20 passive layers of tungsten absorber interleaved with 18 active layers of low-granularity silicon pads. Each pad layer is read out by 110 silicon pad sensors of 72 channels, amounting to a total of 1980 channels. This contribution describes the electronics developed from front-end to back-end.
A new silicon tracker detector (ITS3) will be installed in ALICE Inner Tracking System during the LHC long shutdown 3. We develop a 10.24Gbps Data Serializer and Wireline Transmitter (GWT-PSI) circuit for the readout of the detector. A 16-to-1 multiplexer architecture achieves low power consumption (28mW) and avoids high-frequency (> 640MHz) clock signals in the circuit. A clock-cleaning PLL and power-supply cleaning LDO will be built into the circuit making it immune to the noisy operation environment. A prototype has been submitted in the ER1 production run in the TPSCo 65nm ISC CMOS imaging technology.
Results are presented for gamma and neutron irradiation tests for SFP+ transceivers. The radiation tolerance of the electronics components used in the detector area is a key of the electronics systems at high energy physics experiments. We tested four types of SFP+ transceivers from Ficer. Gamma rays were irradiated up to O(100) Gy at the Cobalt-60 facility of Nagoya University. Neutrons were irradiated up to O(10^12) cm^-2 using the tandem accelerator at Kobe University. The results can be referred to in selecting the SFP+ transceivers for high energy physics experiments.
This contribution presents results from the RD50-MPW family of monolithic High Voltage CMOS (HV-CMOS) pixel chips, which are developed by the CERN-RD50 collaboration to study this technology in view of the harsh requirements imposed by future hadron colliders on tracking systems. Parameters especially considered in this programme are radiation tolerance, time resolution and granularity. This contribution reviews the design of RD50-MPW3, and presents its laboratory and test beam results. It also presents the design details of the latest prototype, RD50-MPW4. The prototypes developed so far are in the 150 nm High Voltage-CMOS (HV-CMOS) process from LFoundry S.r.l.
The extremely low dark current of silicon carbide (SiC) detectors, even after high-fluence irradiation, is utilized to develop a beam monitoring system for a wide range of particle range, i.e., from the kHz to the GHz regime. The system is completely built from off-the-shelve components and is focused on compactness and simple deployment. Beam tests on a 50 um thick SiC detector reveal, that even single particles of a 62.4 MeV proton beam (equivalent to 5.03 MIP) can be detected. Overall accurate results can be achieved up to a particle rate of $10^9$ particles per second.
This paper addresses the challenge of mitigating the effects of radiation on the electronic systems of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by introducing BatMon, a battery-powered, MCU-based wireless radiation monitoring system. The paper proposes software mitigation schemes that can be used alongside an external watchdog to guarantee higher availability of the application without impacting the system performance. Tests conducted at the CHARM facility show that the proposed schemes enable BatMon to achieve 99.9996% availability in the harsh environment of the LHC. The manuscript highlights that the result obtained will also allow the system to be used for critical tasks.
The MDT Trigger Processor (MDTTP) is a key ATLAS Level-0 Muon trigger upgrade component designed to meet High-Luminosity LHC requirements. The MDTTP will use MDT hits in the trigger for the first in ATLAS to improve the momentum resolution of muon candidates provided by RPC and TGC detectors and reduce fake muon trigger rate.
The MDTTP hardware is based on the Apollo ATCA platform. The pre-production prototype includes a VU13P-FPGA, high-speed FireFly optical transceivers, peripherals, and other improvements learned from using the previous hardware demonstrator. We present the prototype status, firmware implementation, core algorithm, slow-control software, and first integration tests.
For the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider era, the trigger and data acquisition system of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment will be entirely replaced. Novel design choices have been explored, including ATCA platforms with SoC controllers and newly available interconnect technologies with serial optical links with data rates up to 28 Gb/s. Trigger data analysis will be performed through sophisticated algorithms, including widespread use of Machine Learning, in Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGAs. The system will process over 50 Tb/s of detector data with an event rate of 750 kHz. The system design and prototyping are described and examples of trigger algorithms reviewed.
The ATLAS collaboration will replace its inner detector by an all-silicon tracker (ITk) for the HL-LHC. The new pixel detector will cover a sensitive area of 13m$^2$. The pixel modules are loaded on light-weight carbon structures in the form of (half)rings and staves. Electrically functional prototypes of these local supports based on the RD53A readout chip were built and extensive system-level tests of these structures were carried out evaluating serial powering, grounding and shielding, system monitoring, and the overall performance of the multi-module detector systems.
In this contribution, the results of these system tests will be presented.
A data conversion and compression ASIC, named LiTE-DTU, has been developed for the upgrade of the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) for the High-Luminosity phase of LHC. The ASIC integrates two 12-bit 160 MS/s ADCs, a data processing unit for gain selection and data compression, and a 1.28 Gb/s serializer.
The ASIC has been extensively tested in laboratory and in beam tests showing excellent yield and performance. The radiation tolerance has been verified with dedicated test campaigns for both total ionizing dose and single event effects. Results from these tests, showing the design readiness for mass production, will be presented.
For the
-II upgrade of the ATLAS Muon Spectrometer to the High Luminosity LHC
(HL-LHC), a new first-level muon track trigger is needed to make use of the high momentum
resolution of the Monitored Drift Tube (MDT). The current front-end electronics of the MDT
chambers do not meet these conditions, they have to be replaced. Therefore, a new ASD2
ASIC chip has been developed. Finally, 50000 ASD2 chips are needed for the ATLAS
experiment. The development of the final testing procedure and the reliability of a first batch
ASD2 chips will be presented.
A novel ultra-low-power front-end discriminator circuit for pixelized detectors, named pseudo-thyristor, is described. It is based on a positive feedback topology using regular CMOS transistors with zero static current, rather than constantly drawing current in typical discriminators. When a small charge is injected at the input, the circuit flips rapidly due to the positive feedback and output a logic transition for further digitization. Simulation shows that in 65 nm process, it is capable of detecting at a threshold of 5 fC while maintain the average power consumption below 10 micro-Watts when the hit occupancy is <10% for 40MHz operation.
The Endcap Timing ReadOut Chip (ETROC) is designed to process LGAD signals with time resolution down to about 40-50ps per hit. The ETROC2 is the first full size (16x16) prototype design with the front-end based on and scaled up from the ETROC1 (4x4). The readout designs at pixel and global level and the system interfaces are all new and are compatible with the final chip specifications in terms of functionality. The ETROC2 is intended as a learning chip, as a stepstone to the ETROC3 which is intended as the pre-production design. The ETROC2 design and test results will be presented.
The HGTD is a novel detector introduced to augment the new all-silicon Inner Tracker in the pseudo-rapidity range from 2.4 to 4.0, adding the capability to measure charged-particle trajectories in time as well as space.
A prototype of Peripheral Electronics Board (PEB), which supports up to 55 front-end modules with 12 lpGBT, 9 VTRx+ and 52 bPOL12v, is developed to work as a bridge between the front-end modules and the off-detector TDAQ.
The on-going R&D effort carried out to study the readout and transmission chips, and the other components, supported by laboratory results, will also be presented.
The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) aims to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy by detecting antineutrinos from nuclear reactors using a large liquid scintillator volume. The detector uses around 20,000 20-inch photomultiplier tubes powered and read out by two electronics readout systems: underwater and above water. The back-end card (BEC) is a crucial component of the latter and links 7,000 underwater electronics boxes to the trigger system. 180 BECs have been installed and tested at the JUNO site, including self-tests and combined tests. This presentation reports on the current status of the BEC and on the various test results.
The status of the development of the Level-0 endcap muon trigger system for the ATLAS experiment at the HL-LHC is presented. Integrations of the new trigger algorithms and the implementation with firmware on a new prototype of the trigger board (Sector Logic, SL) are also presented. Results from hardware tests of the SL prototype board and integration tests with the newly developed front-end board are also shown.
The CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor MIMOSIS being developed for the CBM experiment at FAIR will combine a spatial resolution of 5 µm with a time stamp of 5 µs and operate at peak rates of 80 MHz/cm². The full-scale prototype MIMOSIS-1 met these specifications , and the recently submitted MIMOSIS-2 has addressed shortcomings identified during the dense test campaign. Both complex mixed-signal circuits were developed using the Digital on Top methodology. We present the sensor design, introduce our design methodology and discuss the lessons learned during the design process.
We present a new kind of sensors made of 5µm pixels using 6-metal TJ 180 nm technology. The pixels are interconnected among themselves to conducting lines with three directions 0°, 120° and -120°. Two neighbouring pixels are connected to different lines with different directions. The lines are connected to readout cells hosting current amplifier with its current comparator, together with the digital readout circuitry. In a 400 ns frame, the circuit can output the address position of up to 16 hits. The sensor of 0.5cm2 is intended to reduce the number of electronic channels while preserving the spatial resolution.
An HV-CMOS (High-Voltage CMOS) prototype detector for particle detection in high energy physics experiments, named UKRI-MPW0, has been developed. This chip implements a novel sensor cross-section optimised for biasing the chip from the backside only and achieves an unprecedented breakdown voltage (> 600 V). With such a high breakdown voltage, UKRI-MPW0 is expected to achieve much improved radiation tolerance. The chip contains test structures for edge-TCT measurements and a matrix of monolithic pixels with integrated readout electronics. The design and detailed lab measurements of its pixel matrix after irradiation is presented in this contribution.
An increasing interest is growing towards reconfigurable processing systems embedded on the detector ASICs. Explorative work has been carried out to investigate Single-Event Upset (SEU) rates in open source RISC-V processors. The Ibex RISC-V core includes hardware security features that could detect SEUs in the core and alert the System-on-Chip (SoC) for possible malfunctions. This research addresses the possibility to rely on such hardware secure extensions for radiation hardness assurance.
The use of a radiation-hard microprocessor or the application of a System-on-Chip (SoC) design methodology has a considerable beneficial impact on the future design of ASICs within the HEP community. The STRV (SEU-tolerant-RISC-V) is a Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) protected RSIC-V microprocessor designed to withstand Single Event Effects (SEE) and operate close to a beamline or interaction point.
The results of evaluation studies on the impact of SEEs on the reliability of a RISC-V microprocessor-based system are presented. These evaluation studies include information derived from extended fault injection simulation and heavy ion testing of STRV-R1 samples.
In the ALICE read-out and trigger system, the present GBT and CRU based solution will also serve for Run4 without major modifications. By now, the GBT protocol has been superseded by lpGBT, and the GBT ASIC is not available for new productions. Extensions of the ALICE system (e.g. the planned FoCal detector) will therefore require to use lpGBT while keeping the compatibility with the existing system. In this presentation we show the implementation and testing of a possible integration of the lpGBT-FPGA IP into the CRU firmware, allowing the extension of the present system, keeping it more versatile and future-proof.
High Level Synthesis (HLS) of FPGA firmware using C/C++ has been popular in the design of upgrade trigger systems in High Energy Physics, allowing physicists with no previous firmware expertise to efficiently design digital systems. This presentation will describe the methodology of HLS designs, including comparison of basic building block design of HLS and Hardware Description language (HDL).
Design examples from the CMS L1 trigger system will be presented along with pitfalls to provide a proposed efficient approach to system design with these methods
Targeting on low power consumption and high spatial resolution, the CPV-4 SOI pixel sensor requires about 100 transistors to implement the analog-digital mixed circuit functionality within a given pixel area around 16 um x 20 um. By utilizing 3D vertical integration, signal amplification and threshold discrimination are achieved in the lower-level circuitry, while hit information storage and sparse readout are achieved in the upper-level circuitry, thereby maximizing pixel size reduction and power consumption reduction. This work will present the pixel circuit design and the test results on the completed 3D chips.
NAPA-p1 is a prototype Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor designed in 65 nm CMOS imaging technology, developed to meet requirements for future e+e- colliders. The prototype has dimensions of 1.5 mm × 1.5 mm with a pixel pitch of 25 μm. In nominal conditions, simulations show a pixel jitter of 350 ps-rms and an Equivalent Noise Charge (ENC) of 12 e-rms. The prototype will be characterized this summer, and the results shall be available soon. A discussion will be presented on future strategies to allow the scalability of this design into a large-scale sensor of 10 cm × 10 cm.
The Minimum Ionizing Particle (MIP) Timing Detector (MTD) is introduced in the CMS experiment to measure the time of MIPs. The MTD consists of 432 Readout Units (RUs) in its barrel region (BTL), each powered by two Power Conversion Cards (PCC). PCCs host three radiation and magnetic field tolerant DC-DC converters. More than 1,000 PCCs will be produced to satisfy the assembly needs of BTL with sufficient margins. A reliability study has been conducted on a prototype batch of 80 cards to demonstrate the design and assembly robustness for up to 20 years of operation in BTL’s conditions.
Maintaining the required performance of the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) barrel at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) requires the replacement of the entire on-detector electronics. 12240 new very front end (VFE) cards will amplify and digitize the signals of 62100 lead-tungstate crystals instrumented with avalanche photodiodes. The VFE cards host five channels of CATIA pre-amplifier ASICs followed by LiTE-DTU ASICs, which digitize signals with 160MS/s and 12bit resolution. We present the strategy and infrastructure developed for the testing, burn-in, calibration and assembly of the VFE cards. Moreover, we summarize the test results obtained with 60 prototype cards.
This paper reports the design and measurement results of a 768-channel of 14-bit analog to digital converters. Each channel’s layout pitch is only 8.5µm with a sampling rate from 40KS/s up to 100KS/s. Testing results show a crosstalk about only +/- 1 LSB. The architecture of the circuit and the structure of the layout make it extensible to exceptionally large format of detectors beyond 1000 channels. The circuit is produced to be used as a side element for multi-channel readout systems or alternatively as an IP to be transferred inside very dense integrated circuits.
The paper presents a Dual Use Driver (DUDE) that is a component designed for the “Demonstrator ASIC for Radiation-Tolerant Transmitter” in 28nm (DART28) and is developed in R&D programme on technologies for future experiments. The driver operates at 25.6Gbps and it allows to drive either 100Ω transmission lines and optical ring modulators in a Photonics Integrated Circuit. The driver includes configurable pre-emphasis. The device will allow to demonstrate the feasibility of wavelength division multiplexing optical links operating with bandwidths in excess of 100Gbps per fiber that are capable of sustaining total ionizing radiation doses up to 10MGy.
We report the characterization of the Single Effect Transient (SET) sensitivity of an analogue Phase-Locked Loop under a 63 MeV proton beam of instantaneous fluence 10^10 protons/cm²/s. The clock generator is embedded in a front-end ASIC, namely ALTIROC designed in CMOS 130 nm, reading out Low-Gain Avalanche Diode (LGAD) for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). Observed SET-induced phase jumps allow the estimation of the total cross-section of the PLL. Results are extrapolated to the HL-LHC radiation conditions.
This study evaluates the lifetime and aging process of the aluminium electrolytic capacitors to be used in the new protection systems of the High Luminosity LHC superconducting magnets. The accelerated testing and analysis of several groups of capacitors aged for more than one year provided insights into their expected lifespan and aging process. The results obtained have practical implications for maintenance and replacement schedules, as well as for selection and acceptance of capacitors for new Heater Discharge power Supplies (HDS) equipment. The knowledge gained from this study ensures the safety and reliability of the LHC and its electronic components.
The Low-Power Gigabit Transceiver (lpGBT) is a radiation-tolerant ASIC used in high-energy physics experiments for multipurpose high-speed bidirectional serial links. Almost 200,000 chips have been tested with a production test system capable of exercising the majority of the ASIC functionality to ensure its correct operation.
Furthermore, specific individual qualification tests were carried out beyond the production tester limits, including radiation, multi-drop bus topology, inter-chip communication through different types of electrical links and jitter characterization.
In this paper, an overview of the production and qualification tests is given together with their results demonstrating the robustness and flexibility of the lpGBT.
The CMS Tracker Phase-2 Upgrade requires the production of new sensor modules to cope with the requirements of the HL-LHC. The two main building blocks of the Outer Tracker are the Strip-Strip (2S) and Pixel-Strip (PS) modules. All-together 47520 hybrid circuits will be produced to construct 8000 2S and 5880 PS modules. The circuit designs for the mass production were fine tuned and the kick-off batches were manufactured. The presentation will focus on lessons learned from the prototyping stage, design optimization details for the mass production, test results and yield from the kick-off batches.
Authors:
Akshay Naik, Erich Frahm, Roger Rusack, Diba Dehmeshki, Rohith Saradhy, Yahya Tousi
We present a design of a time delay circuit that we have developed for future applications in particle physics experiments. Our circuit has a dynamic range of 250 ps achieved in steps of 270 fs. The chip was fabricated in TSMC's 65 nm LP process and consists of an array of planar waveguides for fine control and LC lumped circuits for large scale delays. We will report on detailed characterization of the device including some recent results from radiation tests.
This work introduces AI-In-Pixel-65, an ROIC test chip designed for pixelated X-ray detectors using a 65nm Low Power CMOS process. The study compares two data compression techniques, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and AutoEncoder (AE), implemented within the chip's pixelated area to address I/O bottlenecks. Our design methodology utilizes high-level synthesis (HLS) and hls4ml, offering shorter design cycles and similar quality results compared to register-transfer level (RTL) flows. Results show PCA achieves 50-fold compression with a 21% pixel area increase, while AE offers 70-fold compression and similar area increase.
The combination of 3D tracking and high-precision timing measurements has been identified by the European Committee for Future Accelerators as a fundamental requirement to increase detection capabilities for future applications. Among others, on-chip high-quality clock is a key factor determining the overall resolution of Timing ASICs. However, in large and dense chips, power-grid drops can severely affect the non-deterministic jitter of the clock, representing a limit to the performances. This contribution aims at presenting a simulation framework based on commercial tools to evaluate power supply-induced jitter, providing a pre-silicon methodology to assess its impact on timing indeterminism.
For the construction of the future ATLAS strip tracker end-caps, six geometries of silicon strip detector modules were designed. Each module comprises one or two silicon strip sensors and several flexes holding the required readout electronics, designed to match the geometry of each module. Due to the large number of designs, two module geometries using two sensors per ring module were prototyped for the first time in 2022, and showed excessively high noise. This contribution presents an overview of the follow-up investigation to diagnose the issue, the subsequent powerboard re-design and results from the first prototypes in 2023.
The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Tracker Phase 2 Upgrade for the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) will use two module types, 2S and PS, which contain different sensor configurations and custom ASICs. Guaranteeing the power integrity of all the built modules and for the full lifetime of the detector is crucial for the detector performance. This article describes the historical evolution of the powering architecture, the problems encountered, and the solutions implemented for the 2S and PS modules, as well as the final on-module powering strategy along with the data and modelling that led to it.
The design of a new DC/DC power converter capable of being integrated with a detector is described. It works in harsh environment and can supply up to 170 W per channel. Up to four modules, each one equipped with 8 channels, can be accommodated in a water-cooled compact crate with a small volume of 24 dm^3. Its electrical, environmental and thermal performance is detailed here.
The Electric Field Detector (EFD-02) on board of the second China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES-02) will measure the ionospheric electric field components at a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) over a wide frequency band (DC - 3.75 MHz) and with less than 1 \muV/m/\sqrt{Hz} sensitivity. EFD-02 will measure the voltage differences between pairs of probes installed at the tips of four booms deployed from the satellite. In this work we describe the digital hardware section based on a Zynq SoC device in charge of signal processing and data acquisition and we show the instrument overall performances.
We present the design and performance of the new On-Board electronic for the Drift Tubes (OBDT) for the superlayer theta along the direction parallel to the beam-line, built to substitute part of CMS DT Muon on-detector electronics. The OBDT-theta is responsible of the time digitization of DT chamber signals for the theta view, allowing further barrel muons tracking and triggering. It's also in charge of part of the slow-control of the DT chamber systems. A prototype is being tested in the laboratory and in a demonstrator inside CMS, as well as the full functionality in real conditions, showing satisfactorily results.
For the High Luminosity-Large Hadron Colider (HL-LHC) phase, the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is undergoing a major upgrade with a complete redesign of the on- and off-detector electronics. In the new readout architecture, the calorimeter signals are digitised every 25 ns directly on-detector and transferred to the off-detector Tile PreProcessor (TilePPr) via high-speed optical links. The TilePPr reconstructs the energies from the digitised samples and transfers them through its Trigger & Data Acquisition interface (TDAQi) module to the ATLAS Trigger & DAQ system via fixed and deterministic high-speed optical links at speeds of 11.2 Gbps.
This talk presents the Hybrid Detector for Microdosimetry (HDM), capable of providing a superior characterization of the radiation fiend. This is of critical importance in radiation therapy, where a better description of the radiation field can lead to a better treatment plan and, therefore, a better treatment outcome.
HDM is composed of a commercial gas microdosimeter, TEPC, and a tracker made of 4 silicon LGADs layers. This presentation will cover the challenges in implementing the HDM readout architecture, including synchronization and triggering, and will show first measurements obtained with clinical protons.
HEPS-BPIX40 is a new hybrid pixel detector for the High Energy Photon Source in China. It is a full upgrade from BPIX20, with a 128 x 96 pixel matrix and 140 μm x 140 μm pixel size. The circuit operates in single photon counting mode with dual thresholds and programmable gains. The tested frame rate is 2 kHz in continuous readout mode. A detector module covers 3.7 cm x 8.1 cm and consists of 2 x 6 chips. The full system will have 40 modules and approximately six million pixels. This paper presents the detector's design and test results.
The ePIC experiment at the future Electron-Ion Collider aims to use silicon photomultipliers as the photodetector technology for the dual-radiator ring-imaging Cherenkov detector (d-RICH). Despite their advantages for this low light application in high magnetic fields, SiPMs are sensitive to radiation and require rigorous testing to ensure that their single-photon counting capabilities and dark count rate are kept under control over the years. The presented results show the successful use of a complete prototype readout chain based on the ALCOR chip for SiPM characterization measurements and test-beam measurements using the d-RICH prototype.
In the pursuit of clean and sustainable energy, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project has emerged as a beacon of hope. As the world's largest experimental fusion reactor, ITER aims to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion as a viable energy source. However, operating in a challenging nuclear environment presents numerous technical and engineering obstacles that must be overcome to ensure safe and reliable operation.
The diagnostic systems are critical to the successful and safe operation of ITER. They provide the means to observe, monitor and maintain plasma performance over extended periods of time. They provide accurate measurements of plasma behaviour and performance, including those required for protection of the machine and its control, as well as measurements required for physics studies. In total, about 50 diagnostic systems will be installed on ITER.
This presentation focuses on the development of diagnostics systems and the utilization of electronics within the ITER project. The harsh environment, characterized by high temperatures, intense neutron fluxes, and strong magnetic fields, poses significant challenges for electronics and instrumentation.
The first part of the presentation discusses the design and development of diagnostic systems for ITER. These systems encompass a wide range of measurements, including plasma temperature, density, and impurity content.
The second part of the presentation delves into the unique requirements and challenges associated with electronics used in the nuclear environment of ITER. The radiation effects, including total ionizing dose, displacement damage, and single-event effects, pose serious reliability concerns for electronic components. Radiation-hardened designs, materials, and techniques are discussed, along with strategies for mitigating radiation-induced failures and ensuring the longevity of electronic systems.
Finally, this presentation provides an overview of the research and development efforts underway in the field of diagnostics and electronics as part of the ITER project. By addressing the technical challenges and presenting the progress made, it aims to encourage the exchange of knowledge, collaboration and innovation in the field of electronics for nuclear fusion. The knowledge gained from this research will not only contribute to the success of ITER, but will also pave the way for future advances in fusion energy technologies.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the ITER Organization
The Serenity-S1 is a Xilinx VU13P based Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) processing blade that has been optimised for production. It incorporates many developments from prototype cards and where possible adopts solutions being used across CERN. It uses many new parts because commonly used parts have disappeared from the market during the semiconductor crisis with only some returning.
We discuss improvements to simplify manufacture, the performance of new components, some of the more difficult aspects of procurement, the performance of production-grade Samtec 25 Gb/s optical firefly parts and issues with the rack cooling infrastructure.
New advanced front end electronics are designed for the improved RPCs of CMS experiment for data taking during HL-LHC era. This electronics is developed to read out the RPC detectors from both ends of a signal strip, using a new ASIC, iRPCROC, which triggers the Cyclone V FPGA to record the timing information, allowing the correct identification of the position along it. The on-chamber results of the test beams and commissioning at CMS with focus on performance of the electronics will be presented.
The newly build Constant Fraction Discriminator (CFD) with an additional
Time over Threshold (ToT) measurement capabilities designed by Peter Lichard, CERN, will be presented. It operates in a wide dynamic range 1:150, with an excellent time resolution better than 70 ps over one order of magnitude. It is highly customizable for a different signal shapes and thresholds, thanks to a remotely programmable parameters through the DCS commands. Two outputs, each in NIM and LVDS standard, provide ToT information with programmable thresholds. The technical specification and performance measured with cosmic rays and in the high-intensity experiment will be shown.
ALICE ITS3 is a novel vertex detector replacing the innermost layers of ITS2 during LS3. Composed of three truly cylindrical layers of wafer-sized 65 nm stitched Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors, ITS3 provides high-resolution tracking of charged particles generated in heavy-ion collisions. This contribution presents an overview of the ITS3 detector, highlighting its design features, integration and cooling, and the latest results from the ongoing development towards the final sensor. Furthermore, the presentation introduces the off-detector service electronics, which play an essential role in the readout, control, and power supply of the detector.
The the LHCb collaboration proposes a Phase-II Upgrade of the detector, to be installed during the LHC Long Shutdown 4. Currently, the VELO collaboration is exploring new sensor technologies, and the benefits that would derive from adding a time stamp to the track reconstruction. The most recent advances in this field, and the potential candidates that can meet the VELO Upgrade-II requirements, will be presented. In particular, the current state-of-the-art prototypes in the development of ASICs with TDC-per-pixel architecture, the PicoPix ASIC (which is an evolution of the Timepix4 design) and the TIMESPOT ASIC, will be discussed.
The LHCb Experiment is commissioning its first upgrade to cope with increased luminosities of LHC Run3, being able to improve on many world-best physics measurements. A new tracker based on scintillating fibers (SciFi) replaced Outer and Inner Trackers delivering an improved spatial resolution for the new LHCb trigger-less era, with a readout capable of reading ~524k channels at 40MHz. Fully automated calibration of SciFi Front-End Electronics is based on dedicated software tools and operational procedures, validated during SciFi commissioning. This oral presentation describes the SciFi electronics design, implementation, and calibration and presents results showing the detector's performance after commissioning.
Early measurements on monolithic pixel sensor prototypes in the TPSCo 65nm technology indicate a different response and radiation tolerance (up to $5\times10^{15}~1\text{MeV}~\text{n}_{\text{eq}}/\text{cm}^2$) for different sensor layout and process variants, illustrating the importance of layout and process in the path towards increased sensor radiation tolerance. Using these measurement results, TCAD simulations provide more insight to link the macroscopic behaviour of specific sensor variants to the details of its structure. With this insight we can propose a new variant combining the advantages of several measured variants as a path to even better radiation tolerance for the next iteration.
In the context of the Strategic R&D on Technologies for Future Experiments, the sensitivity to single-event-effects of a commercial 28nm CMOS technology was investigated through heavy-ion and proton tests. Two chips were designed to study single- and multi-bit-upset, single-event-transient and single-event-latch-up. Bit upsets were studied on both D-Flip-Flops and foundry SRAMs. LET of heavy ions ranged from 1.3 to 88.39 MeV/mg/cm2, with fluences of 5e6 ions/cm2 for each LET. Protons at 350 and 480-MeV were used. These results provide a comprehensive overview of the SEU sensitivity of the selected 28nm node, representing a milestone in its qualification for HEP applications.
The radiation hardness of transistors in a 22nm Fully Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FDSOI) technology exposed to ultra-high total ionizing dose (TID) was investigated. Custom structures including n- and p-channel devices with different sizes and threshold voltage flavours were irradiated with X-rays up to a TID of 100 Mrad(SiO2 ) with different back-gate bias configurations, up to 2 V. The investigation revealed that the performance is significantly affected by TID with their radiation response being dominated by the charge trapped in the buried oxide. Interestingly, the application of a back-bias of 2 V was not enough to compensate the TID-induced damage.
For the high-luminosity upgrade of the ATLAS Inner Tracking detector, a new pixel detector will be installed to allow for a bigger bandwidth and cope with the increased radiation among other challenges. This contribution will present the evaluation of the Outer Barrel Pixel layer services chains. A full data transmission study covering data merging will be presented from the pixel module all the way to the FELIX data acquisition system, using most of the components foreseen for the detector. Challenges and results of the services chain of the Outer Barrel will be highlighted.
To cope with the increase of the LHC instantaneous luminosity, new trigger readout electronics were installed on the ATLAS Liquid Argon Calorimeters.
On the detector, 124 new electronic boards digitise 10 times more signals than the legacy system. Downstream, large FPGAs are processing up to 20 Tbps of data to compute the deposited energies. Moreover, a new control and monitoring infrastructure has been developed.
This contribution will present the challenges of the commissioning, the first steps in operation, and the milestones still to be completed towards the operation of both the legacy and the new trigger readout for LHC Run-3.
The upcoming ProtoDUNE-II program at the CERN neutrino platform will consist of 2 liquid argon time projection chambers, which will serve as demonstrators of the technologies that will be used in the first 2 far detectors of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). A core component of these detectors is the cryogenic charge readout electronics, which are immersed in liquid argon along with the detectors and are responsible for reading out charge signals from the anodes of the time projection chamber. This talk will discuss the design of these electronics and preliminary performance results from the ProtoDUNE-II assembly experience.
The construction of the ATLAS strip tracker barrel will require the assembly of 12,000 barrel detector modules over the course of 3.5 years. In 2022, during the module pre-production phase, modules were found to display clusters of noisy channels outside required specifications when tested at operating temperatures (-40 ºC), called “Cold Noise”. Extensive investigations into the cause and mechanism of Cold Noise interrupted pre-production and occupied most barrel module assembly sites. This contribution presents an overview of the year-long investigations into Cold Noise, the final identification of the underlying mechanism and necessary changes for the transition to production.
In particle physics applications the photon beam interaction with various materials can produce electric charge which can be measured as current and be used to diagnose particle trajectories, beam intensity, beam profile, position, and stability. SIRIUS, the new 3 GeV fourth-generation Brazilian light source, will make use of hundreds of low-intensity measurement instruments. This work aims at showing up and discussing the design details, challenges and test results of a four-channel high-performance digital ammeter, applied for general-purpose beam diagnostics.
Arrays of superconducting sensors enable particle spectrum analysis with superior energy resolution. To efficiently acquire data from these sensors, the readout electronics operating at room temperature must perform multiple tasks, such as real-time frequency demodulation. We designed a Software-Defined Radio (SDR) system composed of an MPSoC board, an analog-to-digital conversion stage, and a radio frequency front-end mixing stage to meet the system requirements. Nevertheless, utilizing an Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) could simplify the overall system by integrating the conversion stage and potentially eliminating the mixing stage. This work investigates the applicability of RFSoCs for the aforementioned use case.
The Cooling Storage Ring of the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL-CSR) is constructed to study nuclear physics, atomic physics, interdisciplinary science, and relative applications. A Common Readout Unit (CRU) has been designed for HIRFL-CSR to reduce the development time, production cost, and maintenance difficulties of the data transmission at HIRFL. With the Xilinx the Virtex 7 as its main FPGA, the CRU has 32 high-speed fiber optic interfaces to receive the data and two 10 Gigabit Ethernet links to transmit the data out. This paper will discuss the design and performance of the CRU.
HYLITE (High dYmamic range free electron Laser Imaging deTEctor) is a charge-integration pixel detector readout chip designed for SHINE (Shanghai high repetition rate XFEL and extreme light facility). The chip features a frame rate of 10kHz and a successive readout mode. HYLITE200S is the third prototype chip in the HYLITE series, including correlated double sampling circuits to improve noise performances. The signal-to-noise ratio of the chip with a single 12keV photon injection is 9.31. To achieve high-speed data output, HYLITE200S incorporated a clock management block. Tests demonstrated that the data transmission can be achieved steadily at a speed of 3.125Gbit/s.
This contribution presents a pragmatic approach to read-out electronics for drift chambers used in particle physics experiments, specifically for the R3B experiment at GSI. The proposed circuit design uses discrete miniature SMD components and LVDS inputs of a low-cost FPGA to achieve a performance similar to the classic ASD8 ASIC. The presented approach offers an attractive solution for small to medium sized detector systems that require specialized read-out electronics but cannot afford the high cost and development effort associated with ASICs.
We present the design of a high-time resolution MAPS sensor prototype MIC6_V1 based on a 55nm Quad-well CMOS Image Sensor process for the high energy physics experiment vertex detector application. In order to achieve high-spatial resolution, fast readout, and low power consumption, MIC6_V1 has implemented a new node-based, data-driven parallel readout architecture. The integration time is 5us, and by sharing VCO in the pixel group, the hit arrival time resolution can reach 10ns. The pixel size of MIC6_V1 is 23.6μm × 20μm. The pixel matrix is 64 rows by 64 columns, and the size of MIC6_V1 is 2.8mm × 2.8mm.
High-resolution time-to-digital converters (TDCs) are required for time-of-flight measurements in many applications, including particle identification for high-energy physics. FPGA-based TDCs are popular for such applications but suffer from limited resolution and high power consumption compared to custom ASICs. Full-custom TDC designs can also be integrated within multi-channel or pixelated front-end ASICs, thus eliminating power-hungry low-latency links to external FPGAs. Several applications for such integrated TDCs, such as photon time stamping in rare-event searches, also require cooled detectors and front-end electronics. Here we describe a full-custom TDC in 90nm CMOS technology designed for high-resolution and low-power operation in such cryogenic environments.
In this work, a low-power low-noise readout circuit for monolithic pixel detectors is presented. The design focuses on robustness and scalability for both reticle sized chips and stitched designs. The front-end includes a differential charge sensitive amplifier, a reset network and a two-stage discriminator. Threshold trimming is performed with a 3-bit DAC. The feedback capacitance is kept at 0.3 fF to boost the gain for low input charges. The gain is 0.4 mV/e-, the noise is 19 e- r.m.s. and the threshold dispersion after equalization is 68 e- r.m.s. Simulations at schematic level and post-layout extraction are presented.
Beam monitor is a sub detector for the CSR external-target experiment (CEE) at HIRFL, which is designed to monitor the beam status. A custom-designed pixel chip Topmetal-CEEv1 acts as the sensor for locating the position of each particle. In this paper, we present a prototype readout system for beam monitor. Injected pulse test and 241Am alpha test in the laboratory as well as beam test at HIRFL has been done to validate the functionality of the system. The results show that the system could control and configure the pixel chips and read out data from the front end electronics.
The ASIC Design Group at RAL has commenced a three-year programme developing radiation-hardened 28nm circuits intended to provide verified building blocks for future projects. The aim of this programme is to complement and add to the CERN common IP library for 28nm. Our programme includes a range of utility circuits such as high precision amplifiers, a low power 12bit ADC for housekeeping, bandgaps, reference drivers, DACs, a 1Gbps Serializer for low-complexity readout, and more. To explore the benefits of the 28nm technology, a high-resolution LGAD front-end including a 20ps resolution TDC is also under development.
During the ATLAS phase II upgrade, the tracking system of the ATLAS experiment will be replaced by an all-silicon detector called the inner tracker (ITK) with a pixel detector as the most inner part. The monitoring data of the new system will be aggregated from an on-detector ASIC called Monitoring Of Pixel System (MOPS) and sent to the Detector Control System (DCS) using a new interface called MOPS-HUB.
The hardware implementation and experimental results of the MOPS-HUB will be presented. In addition, mitigation techniques including Single-Event Upset (SEU) and Single-Event Transients (SET) for the new system will be introduced.
The HGTD aims to mitigate the effect of large pile-up interactions in the ATLAS Phase II upgrade project by providing accurate time measurements for tracks. However, since HGTD readout modules are unavailable during early stage, an FPGA-based front-end module emulator is designed as a substitute for system testing. This emulator also provides a flexible and cost-effective means to verify the digital logic of the ASIC chip used in the HGTD readout module. This presentation offers a solution for replacing ASIC chips with FPGAs during system test, and also provides a method for verifying the design of an ASIC chip.
The proposed Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) imposes new challenges for the vertex detector in terms of pixel size and material budget. A Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor (MAPS) prototype, TaichuPix, based on a column drain readout architecture, has been implemented to achieve high spatial resolution and fast readout. A 6-layer telescope made by TaichuPix-3 chips and baseline vertex detector were tested at the DESY II TB21 beamline. This presentation proposes to show the architecture and beam test results of the baseline vertex detector prototype.
Upgraded version of the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) Front-End (FE) card is designed to provide the lossless data streaming and reliable control and synchronization of the on-detector Very-Front-End (VFE) units.
The initial card design, validated in the beam tests in 2018-2019, was significantly modified to support the fast and reliable access to the VFE cards components for initialization, calibration and optimization of the data flow. Details of this updated design, performance of the final version of the card as well as the quality control and quality assurance plane for the mass production stage will be discussed.
The Phase-2 Upgrade of the CMS Outer Tracker requires the production of 8000 Strip-Strip and 5880 Pixel-Strip modules, altogether incorporating 47520 hybrid circuits of 15 variants. Module design makes the potential repairs unfeasible; therefore, performing production-scale testing of the hybrids is essential. Accordingly, a scalable, crate-based test system was designed and manufactured, allowing for parallel, high-throughput testing. To reproduce the operating conditions, the system was integrated within a climatic chamber, including the development of a remote control interface and the calibration of thermal cycles. The results and lessons learned from the system integration and commissioning will be presented.
This contribution presents the latest advancements in integrating the Upstream Tracker in LHCb, including deploying control software, data acquisition firmware, decoding algorithm, and data analysis software. Additionally, the progress of different tasks is detailed, along with plans for the immediate future. The main focus of this talk is on the assessment of detector performance, including environmental conditions, electronics performance at the nominal operating temperature, and efficiency and noise hits at the nominal detector operation conditions. Various quality-control tests and component performance verification is described, as data captured with the dedicated firmware, showing the steps of the detector integration in LHCb.
The Micro Vertex Detector is a key component of the PANDA experiment at FAIR. This contribution focuses on the development of the Module Data Concentrator (MDC) ASIC for the configuration, time distribution and readout of the silicon microstrip subdetector system of the PANDA Micro-Vertex Detector (MVD). A first version of the MDC architecture has been developed on FPGA and integrated with the microstrip sensor and the front-end ASIC. The detector module has been integrated into the DAQ framework. The overall description of the MDC and the data acquisition system is presented and the first test results are discussed.
NνDEx is a proposed experiment to hunt for the neutrinoless double beta decay of 82Se, with a high pressure SeF6 gaseous TPC. The readout and DAQ system are important parts of the experiment. The readout plane placed in one endcap of the TPC consists of around 15,000 sensors for charge measurement. It is crucial to read out data from all of these sensors efficiently. This paper will introduce the design of the demonstrator system for the digital readout chain, including the front-end digital sensor array, the data aggregation module and the DAQ system in the back-end.
The High-Luminosity LHC upgrade will have a new trigger system that utilizes detailed information from sub-detectors at the bunch crossing rate, which enables the Global Trigger (GT) to use high-precision trigger objects. Novel machine learning-based algorithms will also be included in the trigger system to achieve higher selection efficiency and detect unexpected signals. The focus of this study is on optimizing the implementation of these novel algorithms, in particular software-based to more hardware-based optimizations are studied in detail. Finally, the study will analyse how the applied optimizations affect performance degradation and the model's resource footprint.
In this work, we present the design, test system, and measurement results of the SMAUG_ND_1 ASIC. The described circuit implements an indirect energy measurement algorithm based on noise distribution measurement. The algorithm is similar to the threshold scan procedure but is done with a single pulse. The chip implements the matrix of 7x7 pixels each with 8 independent comparators and a size of 75x75um. The work describes the measurement process and the results of the algorithm as well as a brief discussion of what can be improved in the next version of the ASIC.
One of the main objectives of the Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO) is to accurately measure the reactor neutrino energy spectrum to provide precise input to the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO). In this study, we designed a full potential readout system for TAO based on the Klaus6 chip.We also developed a mockup prototype based on the design, which includes 4 chips (up to 128 channels). The performance of the prototype has been carefully evaluated both at room temperature and at -50 ℃. Good performance is obtained on gain uniformity, charge linearity, equivalent charge noise, dynamic range, and recovery time.
In this article we describe the measurement results on an “AARDVARC” prototype in 130 nm. AARDVARC is a multi-channel waveform digitizing and processing Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) front-end. We report on various performance metrics: fast sampling (10-14 Gsa/s), deep storage (32K samples), timing resolution (better than 5ps), low power consumption (<100mW/channel).
FABulous is an open-source eFPGA framework developed by the University of Manchester, enabling programmable digital logic to be integrated into ASIC designs. In 2023, our team plans to submit a 28nm CMOS ASIC and explore flatten versus hierarchical design using HVT devices for radiation hardening. This 28nm eFPGA design will use SUGOI and PGPv4 to program and move data in and out of the eFPGA. Post-PnR simulation results will be presented, along with full chip co-simulation with firmware/software for pre-tape out validation results.
The ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC will replace the three innermost layers of the Inner Tracker System (ITS) with an innovative vertexing detector. A single-die stitched monolithic pixel detector of 1.8 cm x 26 cm designed in 65 nm CMOS imaging technology will be used to build these layers. The data communication is done via the 1.8 cm edge of the detector. This contribution will focus on the architecture, challenges and techniques used to aggregate and send off chip up to 46 Gb/s of data flux.
Ongoing developments in the field of radiation-tolerant high-speed transmitters (HST) aim to increase data rates above 25 Gb/s while increasing total ionizing dose (TID) tolerance above 1 Grad. The use of half-rate architecture imposes tight constraints on clock signal quality, in particular its duty cycle. Radiation degradation of transistors in the clock path causes duty cycle distortion (DCD), affecting the output signal quality of the HST. In this contribution, a digitally controlled duty cycle correction system suitable for HST is presented, which compensates for process, voltage, and temperature variation as well as radiation-induced duty cycle distortion of the clock.
The Beam Loss Monitoring system plays a crucial role in the CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron beam monitoring and machine protection. With the upcoming renovation of the system, the acquisition electronics can be based on an innovative ASIC designed by CERN. This paper presents the development of the control and digital processing electronics for this BLMASIC, reviews the architecture and design choices, discusses implementation details, including the controls and redundancy schemes, and highlights some preliminary results. The conclusion outlines the future development steps, and emphasises the interest of this simple and robust architecture using LpGBT and VTRx for critical systems.
The drift chambers of the HADES spectrometer at GSI, Darmstadt/Germany, form its main tracking system. Designed more than twenty years ago, the whole front-end electronics chain is being replaced with state-of-the-art electronics.
The new analog signal processing is based on the PASTTREC ASIC, developed for the PANDA Straw Tube Tracker. The digitization of data happens in FPGA-based TDCs.
The main challenges of the project are the strict spatial constraints given by the experiment setup and the noise sensitivity of the large area gas detectors. In addition, the power consumption needed to be kept low due to thermal constraints.
The FastRICH is a readout chip designed by CERN and the University of Barcelona for the LS3 enhancements and the Upgrade II of the LHCb RICH detector. The 16-channel radiation-hard FastRICH will be capable of reading out MAPMTs, MCPs, and SiPMs, with peak hit rates up to 40MHz. The low-power readout, with 4 lpGBT/VTRx-compatible 1.28GHz SLVS output links, is optimized for bandwidth reduction, allowed by the use of a Constant Fraction Discriminator for timewalk compensation, a programmable hardware shutter, and a custom readout protocol. Preliminary simulations show ~7ps timing resolution, with a total power consumption of <10mW per channel.
Crilin – a semi-homogeneous, longitudinally segmented highly granular electromagnetic calorimeter with Cherenkov PbF2 crystals has excellent timing and improved radiation resistance. A two-channel front-end prototype was tested at CERN-H2 with 120 GeV e- using PbF2 and PWO-UF crystals, yielding a single-cel timing resolution <30 ps for energy deposits <3 GeV. Crilin prototype consists of two sub-modules, housing a 3-by-3 crystal matrices and layers surface-mount 10 um pixel-size UV-extended SiPMs, handled via a fully custom microprocessor-controlled front-end, providing signal amplification/shaping and all slow control functions. The relative CAEN-V1742 based 5Gsps digitisation system employs a custom ultra-low-jitter trigger distribution electronics.
The MicroTCA standard is widely used in the field of particle physics, and Advanced Mezzanine Card is the basic component of the MicroTCA system that requires module management control (MMC) for management. RISC-V is an open source ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) with extensive use. In this paper, we implement the MMC firmware on the MCU with RISC-V architecture. We build a universal standard library that is compatible with both the STM32F1XX and GD32VF1XX series MCU based on ARM and RISC-V architecture respectively. Interrupt response time is tested to compare real-time transaction processing performance of two popular processor architectures.
In this paper, we explore Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects on low-frequency noise characteristics of 28-nm bulk CMOS transistors. In order to better understand the bias dependence of noise characteristics, measurements were performed at several operating points, both in linear and saturation regions. The challenge of differentiating between DC-induced shifts and newly generated Random Telegraph Noise (RTN) centers contribution to the Power Spectral Density (PSD) curve change demonstrates the insufficiencies of current analysis methods. We present examples of irradiation-generated RTN defects as well as various TID effects on noise PSD curves with pre-existing RTN sources.
Digital circuits exposed to radiation, e.g. at HL-LHC, are equipped with radiation-hardening features such as triple modular redundancy and error-correction codes. A method is developed to measure the single-event-upset cross section from error rate measurements in register banks that are protected by both ECC and TMR, taking into account the non-linear relationship between the cross section and the error rate. The method is employed to measure this cross section using data from irradiation tests of the ECON-T, an ASIC developed for the CMS experiment, and then to predict the error rate in the ECON-T during operation on the CMS detector.
A new HV-CMOS pixel chip, called MightyPix, is being developed for the Mighty Tracker, an upgrade planned for LHCb in anticipation of the HL-LHC. Extensive research is ongoing to study the tracks and occupancy at the Mighty Tracker. This data is now used to simulate MightyPix’s performance in the LHCb environment, with focus on the digital readout. First results show an efficiency of 99.7% for MightyPix for the highest hit rates expected at the Mighty Tracker, which reach 17 MHz/cm$^2$. The bottleneck was found to be the readout speed, which yielded new design ideas to further improve the digital readout.
The Mu2e CsI crystal calorimeter has high granularity, 10% energy and 500 ps timing resolution for 100 MeV electrons, and will achieve extremely high levels of reliability and stability and in a harsh operating environment. Each crystal is readout by two custom UV-extended SiPMs, with independent readout channels, coupled to custom front-end electronics boards, to provide individually programmable bias voltages, perform signal amplification and shaping, while monitoring currents and temperatures. The FEE design was validated for operation in high-vacuum and under 1T B-field. An extensive radiation-hardness campaign certified the FEE design for ionizing dose, displacement damage dose and single-event effects.
In this contribution, we present the recent developments in the context of the OpenIPMC project, which proposes a free and open-source Intelligent Platform Management Controller (IPMC) software and an associated controller mezzanine for use in ATCA electronic boards. We discuss our experience in the operation of OpenIPMC on prototype boards designed for the upgrades of particle physics experiments at CERN. We show the addition of new functions and support for new protocols in the controller mezzanine firmware. Finally, the latest changes and improvements to the board design are presented.
We will report the performance of Topmetal-S chip, a charge sensor specifically designed to directly sense ions for the high-pressure ion TPC of N$\nu$DEx experiment for neutrinoless double-beta decay search.The signal waveforms were investigated with various experiments and chip configurations.The equivalent noise charge of Topmetal-S is measured to be 120 e$^{-}$.Different ions species, both with negative or positive charges, could be detected by the sensor.The mobilities of majority ion charge carriers are measured for negative (positive) species in air and SF$_6$ respectively.The expected precision of the drift distance reconstruction using different velocities of ion species are discussed for N$\nu$DEx experiment.
The interplay between High Energy Physics and Positron Emission Tomography detector development keeps providing encouraging outcomes of mutual interest, most notably observed in the development of scintillators, photon detectors, as well as the physics simulation tools. Our group develops PET detectors with the time of flight ability. In this work we present the 16-channel prototype which uses FBK SiPMs and the FastIC ASIC. The prototype has a 3mm pixel pitch and uses LYSO crystals for gamma detection. We present the construction, calibration, measured results and discuss future development
directions.
The consolidation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beam position monitor (BPM) requires the deployment of about 5000 single-mode radiation-tolerant optical transmitters, working at 10 Gbps during 20 years of operation. While the use of the custom devices being designed at CERN remains the baseline for the project, 8 commercial of the shelf (COTS) optical transceivers have been evaluated as an alternative. This paper presents the results of the full characterization in radiation of these COTS devices, including cumulative effects and single event effects (SEE), evaluated during both data transmission and reception.
The MUX64 ASIC is a 64-to-1 analog multiplexer developed to expand the ADC input channels in the peripheral electronics of HGTD for the ATLAS Phase-II upgrade. The MUX64 chips will be used in the radiation field of high-luminosity pp collisions at LHC to an integrated luminosity of 4000 fb-1. The radiation hardness of MUX64 have been tested with 80 MeV protons and X-ray exposures for damages caused by NIEL and TID, respectively. The irradiated samples have shown tolerance to withstand the NIEL to a fluence of 3.21 × 1015 (Si 1 MeV neq/cm2), and the TID of 0.746 MGy (Si).
Thirty-four RD53a Pixel detector modules arriving from different assembly sites are received at CERN in order to be integrated into the ITk demonstrator. The modules will go through different production validation stages, to monitor any performance degradation before the last stage with a full system test on the demonstrator. To mimic real detector services, multiple modules integrated on special mechanical loading supports and cooled down with a Co2 plant are tested. The objective of the demonstrator is to study the module's performance between the reception stage to the final integration operation and to develop the necessary infrastructure needed for testing.
A charge-redistribution ADC with 10-bit resolution is implemented in the TPSCo 65nm CMOS process. The design is intended for flexible on-demand monitoring of vital system signals, such as temperature, in MAPS detectors. The successive approximation principle is implemented using only two matched capacitors and a trimming DAC, while an internal clock generator and digital sequencer are used to generate control signals for stepping through the conversion phases. The clock generator has a programmable output frequency, allowing sampling rates of 50–500 kS/s. Layout area is minimized by optimizing the transistor count within the sequencer as well as careful full-custom layout.
Advances in timing detector technology require new specialized readout electronics. Applications demand high rep rates, below 10 ps time of arrival resolution and, low power. A possible path to achieve O(10 ps) time resolution is an integrated chip using Silicon Germanium (SiGe) technology. Using DoE SBIR funding, Anadyne, Inc. in collaboration with UC Santa Cruz has developed a prototype SiGe front end readout chip optimized for low power and timing resolution (0.6 mW/channel, 10 ps of timing resolution for 8 fC). In this contribution the ASIC performance simulation and the results from the first prototype run will be shown.
We report on our current developments towards a silicon photonic, 4-channel wavelength division multiplexed transmitter system with planar fiber chip coupling. The optical core components consisting of the photonic chip and the connecting V-groove mounted glass fibers were assembled with sub-micrometer accuracy on a glass plate with low thermal expansion for a stable fiber chip coupling. This setup is ready to attach the DC-biasing and termination board as well as a fan-out board for 4x10 Gb/s drivers or a 4x32 Gb/s driver board. Experimental results of the optical and optoelectrical performance will be presented.
After Run III the ATLAS detector will undergo a series of upgrades to cope with the harsher radiation environment and increased number of proton interactions in the High Luminosity-LHC. One of the key projects in this suite of upgrades is the ATLAS Inner Tracker (ITk). The pixel detector of the ITk must be read out accurately and with extremely high rate. The Optosystem performs optical- to-electrical conversion of signals from the pixel modules. We present recent results related to the performance of the data transmission chain pivoted on the Optoboards and to the design, testing and production of the Optopanels.
This work presents the analog circuitry of the FastRICH ASIC, a 16-channel ASIC, developed in a 65 nm CMOS technology specifically designed for the RICH detector at LHCb to readout a wide range of detectors like Photomultiplier Tubes, to be used at the LHC Run 4 or SiPMs, candidates for Run 5. The front-end (FE) stage has an input impedance (Zin) below 50 Ω and an input dynamic range from 5 µA to 5 mA with a power consumption of ~5 mW/channel. The chip includes a Constant Fraction Discriminator (CFD) and a Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) for digitization.
The ATLAS Strip Tracker for HL-LHC consists of individual modules that host silicon sensors and front-end electronics. The modules are then mounted on carbon-fiber substructures hosting up to 14 modules per side. An End-of-Substructure (EoS) card connects up to 28 data lines to the lpGBT and VL+ ASICs that provide data serialization and 10 GBit/s optical data transmission to the off-detector systems respectively. The EoS is powered by a dedicated Dual-Stage DC-DC converter. With the EoS now moving into production we report on first experiences from production and also give a few lessons learned during the project duration.
We present the development of the FBCM23 ASIC designed for the Phase-II upgrade of the Fast Beam Condition Monitoring (FBCM) system built at the CMS experiment. The FBCM system should provide reliable luminosity measurement with 1ns time resolution enabling the detection of beam-induced background. The FBCM23 ASIC comprises six channels of fast preamplifier working in transimpedance configuration followed with CR-RC3 shaper and leading edge discriminator. The paper will show the optimization of the design, overall architecture and the detailed implementation in a CMOS 65nm process as well as preliminary electrical performance.
The ATLAS level-1 calorimeter trigger is a custom-built hardware system
that identifies events containing calorimeter-based physics objects,
including electrons, photons, taus, jets, and missing transverse energy.
In Run 3, L1Calo has been upgraded to process higher granularity
input data. The new trigger, currently running in parallel with the
legacy system, comprises several FPGA-based feature extractor modules,
which process the new digital information from the calorimeters and
execute more sophisticated trigger algorithms. The design of the
system will be presented along with an analysis of the improved
performance of the upgrade in the increasingly challenging Run-3
LHC pile-up environment.
The assembly of the ATLAS Inner Tracker requires the construction of 19,000 silicon strip sensor detector modules in eight different geometries. Modules will be assembled and tested at 31 institutes on four continents, from sensors, readout chips and flexes. In order to adhere to the module specifications defined for sufficient tracking performance, a rigorous programme of quality control and assurance was established to cover components at every stage of assembly. This contribution presents an overview of the QA/QC programme for ITk strip tracker modules, results from the pre-production phase (5% of the production volume) and proposed adjustments for production.
Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) chambers for muons detection at ATLAS Experiment adopt analog front-end read-out electronics for precise-tracking/momentum measurements of detected particles [1]. State-of-the-art has historically used bipolar shaping electronics (at approximately 800 ns baseline recovery time [2]) that scarcely fits with High-Luminosity (HL) requirements where small-MDT (sMDT [3]) are used at 180 ns input signal time-width. This brief presents 4-channels Application Specified Integrated Circuit in 65 nm CMOS for sMDT signal amplification and shaping that performs < 200 ns baseline recovery time and avoids distortion of Time-over-Threshold (ToT) characteristic due to multiple close input charge pulses composing sMDT signal.
The design of HVCMOS pixel detectors for measuring Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) and Solar Energetic Particles (SEP) in space is presented. The design goals are: (a) cover a very wide dynamic range (from ~0.5fC to pC) and (b) minimize the power consumption. Two pixel designs were implemented, one tailored to the measurement of high energy depositions due to impinging ions and one with high gain for the low energy depositions resulting from minimum ionizing particles. Both designs have been fabricated in the LFoundry 0.15μm technology. The design choices are backed by simulation results and preliminary measurements.
ECAL Barrel (EB) and MTD Barrel Timing Layer (BTL) subdetectors of the CMS are approaching series production of electronic boards, including voltage conditioning PCBs: LVR and PCC respectively. 2448 LVRs and 864 PCCs will be installed during LS3 of the LHC. These boards are hosting radiation-tolerant bPOL12V ASICs which convert a broad input voltage range into required voltage levels for microelectronics between 1.2 – 2.5V. Each card must be tested multiple times at various production stages to ensure its quality. This contribution describes a methodology of testing bPOL12V conversion quality including the detection of instability regions at certain load levels.
The electronic systems at CERN, exposed to the harsh radiation environments of particle accelerators and experiments, require specific qualification procedures to ensure reliability under radiation. A large number of distributed systems, thermal neutron fluences in shielded areas, and spectra composed mainly of neutrons are some of the unique challenges that the LHC presents. CERN has developed its own radiation hardness assurance procedure that addresses them through specific test methodologies. Based on lessons learned from component and system qualification, this paper presents CERN's system qualification procedure, these test methods, and lessons learned.
The CHARM Radiation Tolerant Tester Board (CRATEBO) is a testing platform for the CERN High-energy Accelerator (CHARM) irradiation facility. It is meant to ease the radiation testing of FPGA-based systems by providing users with a radiation-tolerant carrier card for the Device Under Test (DUT). It provides a high-speed communication interface, a flexible power supply, and DUT connections via a System-On-Module socket and an HPC-FMC connector. It is a permanent installation in the CHARM facility at CERN that gives the possibility to users to perform radiation tests of their system with minimum development effort on the test setup.
The PADME experiment at LNF-INFN employs positron-on-target-annihilation technique to search for new light particles. Crucial part of the experiment are the charged particle detectors, composed of plastic scintillator bars with light transmitted by wavelength shifting fibers to silicon photomultipliers (SiPM). The location of the detector – close to a turbomolecular pump, inside a vacuum tank, and exposed to 0.5 T magnetic field – has driven the design of custom modular SiPM front-end and power supply electronics. The design of the system and its performance, confirming the desired sub-ns resolution on the reconstructed particle times, will be shown and discussed.
We present the recent development of a lightweight detector capable of accurate spatial, timing, and amplitude resolution of charged particles. The technology is based on double-sided double-metal p+-n-n+ micro-strip silicon sensors, ultra-light long aluminum-polyimide micro-cables for the analogue signal transfer, and a custom-developed SMX read-out ASIC capable of measurement of the time ($\Delta t\simeq 5\,\mathrm{ns}$) and amplitude. Dense detector integration enables material budget $>0.3\%,X_0$. The sophisticated powering and grounding keeps the noise under control.
In addition to its primary application in Silicon Tracking System of the future CBM experiment in Darmstadt, our detector will be utilized in other research applications.
For optimal operations in the high radiation and pileup environment of the HL-LHC, the CMS-HGCAL requires precise timing information at the level of 30ps (RMS) for a particle shower. The time measurement in Silicon detector modules is performed using a per-channel time-of-arrival discriminator coupled with charge measurement to correct for the time-walk. The module design includes access holes in the PCB and in the sensor passivation to enable infrared laser light to be injected directly into the sensor cells. We present the calibration and timing-in of the system used to perform measurements as well as the module time performance results.
Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) are widely used for several applications, such as High Energy Physics experiments, as well as other research and industrial fields. SiPMs working at low temperature, in particular, are the most interesting application for the newly large particle detectors for neutrinos and dark matter experiments. In this work we present a low-noise, high-speed front-end electronics (Front-End Boards, FEBs) for large area SiPMs to be used in the JUNO-TAO experiment. The FEBs are able to manage the signals coming from a 25 cm^2 tile, showing single photoelectron resolution better than 13% and dynamic range up to 250 p.e.
Pioneering physics experiments require increasingly faster data transfers and high-throughput electronics, which drives the research towards a new class of serialisers and optical links. In this framework, the DART28, a $100\,Gbps$ radiation tolerant serialiser and driver, has been designed in $28\,nm$ CMOS technology and submitted in April 2023. The development has been coupled with an FPGA based emulation, which provided an early assessment of its behaviour, a scalable system-level demonstrator and an effective evaluation tool for compatible commercial solutions. The challenges faced in this research and the architecture of both the hardware setup and the firmware will be described.
The characterization of compact non-traveling-wave Mach-Zehnder modulators (NTW-MZMs) for optical readout in high-energy physics experiments will be presented to provide power-efficient alternatives to conventional traveling-wave devices and a more resilient operation compared to ring modulators. Electro-optical small-signal and large-signal measurements will be reported to show the performances of a custom NTW-MZM designed and fabricated in iSiPP50G IMEC’s technology in the framework of INFN's FALAPHEL project. Bit-error-rate results will demonstrate its potential suitability for data links up to 25 Gb/s when being driven by voltage levels compatible with integrated CMOS drivers.