The “Topical Workshop on Electronics for Particle Physics” is the successor of the LEB and LECC Workshop series, which were initiated in 1994 by the LHC Electronics Board (LEB), an advisory board to the CERN LHC Experiments Committee.  Since 2007, the workshop runs autonomously under the name “Topical Workshop on Electronics for Particle Physics” and covers all aspects of electronics for particle physics experiments. The workshop emphasis is shifting towards R&D for future projects, such as the LHC upgrades, CLIC, ILC, neutrino facilities as well as other particle and astro-particle physics experiments. The latest workshop in the series took place from 17^th-21^th of September 2018 at the Campus Carolus of KU Leuven in Antwerp, Belgium, and attracted more than 230 participants, the highest attendance ever observed.

The workshop covered a wide variety of topics, presented in 100 posters and 60 oral contributions during 8 plenary sessions, 15 parallel sessions (ASICs, Optoelectronics and links, Radiation tolerant components and systems, Systems, Trigger, Power, Programmable logic, Production and testing), 2 poster sessions and 4 working group meetings (Microelectronics user group, FPGA and Timing working group, Powering working group). In addition, 11 invited talks discussed challenging projects in our field (e.g. the High Granularity Calorimeter of CMS) or advanced technological topics (e.g. technology and challenges for extreme ultraviolet lithography or silicon photonics for next-generation optical interconnects).

At the end of the week, one gets a very good picture of the achievements and difficulties (being a workshop, a substantial number of presentations relate encountered problems and issues) in electronics development. This year we have seen that ASICs are still profoundly driving innovation in particle physics, with pixels approaching to Gen2 era with very significant improvements, that “feature extraction” are now performed by ASICs on detectors, that radiation hard links are almost as fast as commercial ones, that power in ADCs is decreasing in a spectacular way, that extremely complex FPGAs in back-end electronics are essential for data reduction and for implementing highly complex trigger boxes with incredible computational power and that study of radiation effects in electronics devices have reached an unprecedented degree of sophistication, probably second to none in other scientific research area.

A lively workshop

TWEPP is the only workshop fully devoted to electronics in our community and remains an important ingredient for the flow of information, sharing experience and promoting good design practices. The number of received contributions has been increasing every year and the willingness of institutes to organize this workshop (see http://twepp-workshops.web.cern.ch/TWEPP-Workshops/) shows, if needed, the necessity of keeping it alive.

A good fraction of the 230 participants in the conference venue cloister.

With a strong ESE and CERN involvement

ESE and CERN are providing a strong support to TWEPP, with all the chairpersons originated from ESE (currently co-chaired by Sandro Marchioro and Alex Kluge, with Alex taking over for the 3 coming years), a strong contribution to the organizing committee, the support for publishing the proceedings and the provision of administrative assistance.

Back to Antwerp

While Antwerp is not infamous for its nice weather conditions late Summer, the sun was shining most of the week and allowed the participants to enjoy the beautiful Antwerp city center and harbor during the lunch breaks, the evenings and the organized social events. The author does not know how many used their spare time to deal genuine diamonds (not to be used as particles detectors!).

The next TWEPP Workshop will take place from 2^nd – 6^th of September 2019 in Santiago de Compostella, Spain. It will be mandatory that the participants walk at least 20 km to destination!

Further reading:

For the conference web site and all presentations and posters, see https://indico.cern.ch/event/697988/. For the workshop proceedings, see https://pos.sissa.it/343/ .