John Chramowicz

CAPTAN: A hardware architecture for integrated data acquisition, control, and analysis for detector development

The Electronic Systems Engineering Department of the Computing Division at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has developed a data acquisition system flexible and powerful enough to meet the needs of a variety of high energy physics applications. The system described in this paper is called CAPTAN (Compact And Programmable daTa Acquisition Node) and its architecture and capabilities are presented in detail here.

The VCSEL-based array optical transmitter (ATx) development towards 120-Gbps link for collider detector: development update

A compact radiation-tolerant array optical transmitter module (ATx) is developed to provide data transmission up to 10Gbps per channel with 12 parallel channels for collider detector applications. The ATx integrates a Vertical Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (VCSEL) array and driver circuitry for electrical to optical conversion, an edge warp substrate for the electrical interface and a micro-lens array for the optical interface. This paper reports the continuing development of the ATx custom package. A simple, high-accuracy and reliable active-alignment method for the optical coupling is introduced. The radiation-resistance of the optoelectronic components is evaluated and the inclusion of a custom-designed array driver is discussed.

Free-Space optical interconnects for cable-less readout in particle physics detectors

Particle physics detectors utilize readout data links requiring a complicated network of copper wires or optical fibers. Upgrades to such detectors may require additional bandwidth to be provisioned with limited space available to route new cables or fibers. In contrast, free-space optical interconnects will offer cable-less readout, thereby resulting in significant reductions of material and labor to install and manage the cables. A collaborative effort between Fermilab and Vega Wave Systems is pursuing the development of a unique free-space optical link design that utilizes the transparency of silicon at wavelengths including 1310 nm and multiple wavelengths used in standard telecommunications applications such as coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM). The first step in the pursuit of that design is a proof that the concept may be viable. To that end, experiments have been performed to characterize the bit error rate performance of a prototype link over a free-space optical path and through doped silicon at multi-gigabit rates. These experiments have demonstrated that operation within acceptable bit error rates is possible using single and multiple wavelength transmission arrangements.

Testbeam and laboratory characterization of CMS 3D pixel sensors

The pixel detector is the innermost tracking device in CMS, reconstructing interaction vertices and charged particle trajectories. The sensors located in the innermost layers of the pixel detector must be upgraded for the ten-fold increase in luminosity expected at the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). As a possible replacement for planar sensors, 3D silicon technology is under consideration due to its good performance after high radiation fluence. In this paper, we report on pre- and post- irradiation measurements of CMS 3D pixel sensors with different electrode configurations from different vendors. The effects of irradiation on electrical properties, charge collection efficiency, and position resolution are discussed. Measurements of various test structures for monitoring the fabrication process and studying the bulk and surface properties of silicon sensors, such as MOS capacitors, planar and gate-controlled diodes are also presented.

The 120Gbps VCSEL Array Based Optical Transmitter (ATx) development for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) experiments

The integration of a Verticle Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (VCSEL) array and a driving Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) in a custom optical array transmitter module (ATx) for operation in the detector front-end is constructed, assembled and tested. The ATx provides 12 parallel channels with each channel operating at 10 Gbps. The optical transmitter eye diagram passes the eye mask and the bit-error rate (BER) less than 10(-12) transmission is achieved at 10 Gbps/ch. The overall insertion loss including the radiation induced attenuation is sufficiently low to meet the proposed link budget requirement.

Evaluation of emerging parallel optical link technology for high energy physics

Modern particle detectors utilize optical fiber links to deliver event data to upstream trigger and data processing systems. Future detector systems can benefit from the development of dense arrangements of high speed optical links emerging from industry advancements in transceiver technology. Supporting data transfers of up to 120 Gbps in each direction, optical engines permit assembly of the optical transceivers in close proximity to ASICs and FPGAs. Test results of some of these parallel components will be presented including the development of pluggable FPGA Mezzanine Cards equipped with optical engines to provide to collaborators on the Versatile Link Common Project for the HI-LHC at CERN.

Laboratory and testbeam results for thin and epitaxial planar sensors for HL-LHC

The High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) upgrade of the CMS pixel detector will require the development of novel pixel sensors which can withstand the increase in instantaneous luminosity to L = 5 × 1034 cm–2s–1 and collect ~ 3000fb–1 of data. The innermost layer of the pixel detector will be exposed to doses of about 1016 neq/ cm2. Hence, new pixel sensors with improved radiation hardness need to be investigated. A variety of silicon materials (Float-zone, Magnetic Czochralski and Epitaxially grown silicon), with thicknesses from 50 μm to 320 μm in p-type and n-type substrates have been fabricated using single-sided processing. The effect of reducing the sensor active thickness to improve radiation hardness by using various techniques (deep diffusion, wafer thinning, or growing epitaxial silicon on a handle wafer) has been studied. Furthermore, the results for electrical characterization, charge collection efficiency, and position resolution of various n-on-p pixel sensors with different substrates and different pixel geometries (different bias dot gaps and pixel implant sizes) will be presented.

Parallel optics technology assessment for the Versatile Link project

This poster describes the assessment of commercially available and prototype parallel optics modules for possible use as back end components for the Versatile Link common project. The assessment covers SNAP12 transmitter and receiver modules as well as optical engine technologies in dense packaging options. Tests were performed using vendor evaluation boards (SNAP12) as well as custom evaluation boards (optical engines). The measurements obtained were used to compare the performance of these components with single channel SFP+ components operating at a transmission wavelength of 850 nm over multimode fibers.

Distributed Data Acquisition and Storage Architecture for the SuperNova Acceleration Probe

The SuperNova acceleration probe (SNAP) instrument is being designed to collect image and spectroscopic data for the study of dark energy in the universe. This paper describes a distributed architecture for the data acquisition system which interfaces to visible light and infrared imaging detectors. The architecture includes the use of NAND flash memory for the storage of exposures in a file system. Also described is an FPGA-based lossless data compression algorithm with a configurable pre-scaler based on a novel square root data compression method to improve compression performance. The required interactions of the distributed elements with an instrument control unit will be described as well.

An overview of packaging and characterization results of pixel multichip modules at Fermilab

At Fermilab, there is an ongoing pixel detector R&D effort for high energy physics with the objective of developing high performance vertex detectors suitable for the next generation of HEP experiments. The pixel module presented here is a direct result of work undertaken for the cancelled BTeV experiment. It is a very mature piece of hardware, having many characteristics of high performance, low mass and radiation hardness driven by the requirements of the BTeV experiment. The detector presented in this paper consists of three basic devices; the readout integrated circuit (IC) FPIX2A, the pixel sensor (TESLA p-spray) and the high density interconnect (HDI) flex circuit that is capable of supporting eight readout ICs. The characterization of the pixel multichip module prototype as well as the baseline design of the eight-chip pixel module and its capabilities are presented. The PCI test adapter (PTA) card used to characterize the pixel module prototypes is also presented. These prototypes were characterized for threshold and noise dispersion. The bump-bonds of the pixel module were examined using an X-ray inspection system. Furthermore, the connectivity of the bump-bonds was tested using a radioactive source (90Sr), while the absolute calibration of the modules was achieved using an X-ray source. This paper provides a view of the integration of the three components that together comprise the pixel multichip module