Sep 1 – 5, 2025
ETH Zurich
Europe/Zurich timezone

Smartpixels: Intelligent pixel detectors: Towards a radiation hard ASIC with on-chip machine learning in 28nm CMOS

Sep 4, 2025, 1:50 PM
20m
ETH Zurich

ETH Zurich

HIT E 51, Siemens Auditorium, ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg campus, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland
Standard Talk Contributed talks

Speakers

Benjamin Weiss (Cornell University) Jannicke Pearkes (University of Colorado Boulder (US))

Description

The Smartpixels project is a coordinated effort to co-design pixel ASICs, design tools, ML algorithms, and sensors for on-detector data reduction, motivated by the technical challenges of current and future colliders. The drive to greater precision requires smaller pixel pitch, which together with higher event rates arising from pileup and/or beam-induced background generates petabytes of data per second. Readout chips must be power-efficient, radiation-hard, and capable of real-time data processing.

The smartpixels team has developed algorithms for selecting the signatures of high-momentum tracks and coarse particle-trajectory reconstruction, and explored how the performance changes with pixel sensor geometry, orientation, and irradiation.

We have leveraged and extended hls4ml to support neural network architectures meeting the strict latency and area constraints. To target our TSMC 28nm ASIC implementations, we have integrated the flow with Catapult HLS, allowing seamless synthesis of these designs into RTL for backend integration, and our first custom pixel ASICs have been produced and are undergoing testing.

We will present the status of ongoing work, including efforts in testing ASICs, producing a new ASIC with trajectory-reconstruction algorithm, and improving the realism of the detector simulation though including noise, charge thresholds, and other effects.

Author

Jannicke Pearkes (University of Colorado Boulder (US))

Co-authors

Abhijith Gandrakota (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US)) Alice Bean (The University of Kansas (US)) Anthony Badea (University of Chicago (US)) Benjamin Parpillon (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US)) Benjamin Weiss (Cornell University) Corrinne Elaine Mills (University of Illinois Chicago (US)) Douglas Ryan Berry (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US)) Farah Fahim (Fermilab) Giuseppe Di Guglielmo (Fermilab) Jennet Elizabeth Dickinson (Cornell University (US)) Jim Hirschauer (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US)) Karri Folan Di Petrillo (University of Chicago) Keith Ulmer (University of Colorado, Boulder (US)) Lindsey Gray (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US)) Mark Neubauer (Univ. Illinois at Urbana Champaign (US)) Miaoyuan Liu (Purdue University (US)) Morris Swartz (Johns Hopkins University (JHU)) Nhan Tran (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US)) Nick Manganelli (Northeastern University (US)) Petar Maksimovic (Johns Hopkins University (US)) Ronald Lipton (Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (US)) Shruti R Kulkarni (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Presentation materials