ESE

Pushing the boundaries of monolithic CMOS sensor technologies

Silicon solid state detectors have been developed over a long time to address the challenges of particle tracking and vertexing. At the LHC, when the machine reaches its full design regime, it collides proton bunches at a rate of 40 million times…

Asterix in Switzerland

This episode of the adventures of the winged-helmed Gaul was published in 1970 and foretold what would happen 28 years later, when the CERN microelectronics group (MIC at the time, now the ME section in EP-ESE) welcomed the arrival of its first X-…

lpGBT ASIC Production

What is the lpGBT ASIC ? Figure 1: The lpGBT silicon die on the package substrate (left) and the finished product with overmold (right) The Low Power Giga Bit Transceiver (lpGBT) is a reliable, radiation-tolerant ASIC designed for use in multiple…

Wafer-level testing of CMS Outer Tracker ASICs

The Macro-Pixel ASIC (MPA) and Short-Strip ASIC (SSA) are the new read-out chips used to process particle hit signals of pixel and strip sensors in the upcoming CMS Outer Tracker of the High-Luminosity LHC Upgrade (HL-LHC). The two chips are…

64 channel picosecond time resolution instrumentation in 25 milligrams of silicon

The EP-ESE group has finalized the development of a 64 channel picosecond TDC (Time to Digital Converter) ASIC and 20 thousand pieces have been produced. One of the key challenges for future HEP experiments is the development of very high time…

HEP responds to the global chips crisis

Over the past year, semiconductor prices have been surging in Europe as demand increases globally. While this is happening with most products, it's been a larger problem given the role of semiconductors in most electronics, such as consumer…

Medipix3 reaches the clinic

In early October, the CERN Medipix Team (EP-ESE-ME) visited the newly installed Medipix3-based spectroscopic CT scanner at the Lausanne University Hospital CHUV, Lausanne. The 3D colour X-ray scanner has been developed in New Zealand by MARS…

System-on-Chip in Particle Physics Experiments

Many experiments in particle physics use custom-built electronics boards in order to perform event triggering and data readout. For many years now, those electronics boards have been using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for processing data.…

A safety and reliability perspective of the CERN RadiatiOn Monitoring Electronics (CROME).

CERN has the legal obligation to protect the public and the people working on its premises from any unjustified exposure to ionising radiation. In this context, radiation monitoring is one of the main tasks of the Radiation Protection Group.…

FastIC and FastICpix developments

Precise time tagging is a hot topic in High Energy Physics and in other fields. A number of detector technologies are available but there are few multi-channel front-end ASICs capable of providing time tagging in the region of 10ps. This article…

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