ESE

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…

CHIPS: A new EP-ESE service for the HEP community

ASIC technology and designs are becoming increasingly complex but bring potentially huge benefits to HEP experiments (see also previous EP article "A bright future for microelectronics"). Figure 1 summarises the evolution of CMOS technologies in the…

Silicon photonics for high-energy physics experiments

Optical links have become ubiquitous in High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments to transport data generated from the particle detectors and other control points along the accelerator to the processing electronics. So far, links based on both single-…

Colour X-rays for Medicine: The 2019 specXray workshop

The fifth workshop on Medical Applications of Spectroscopic X-ray Detectors (specXray) took place at CERN from 13 to 17th of May. Since its establishment in 2011, the workshop has brought together specialists from different but related…

Electronics experts come together at Antwerp

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…

Developing new electronics for the CMS tracking system

The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) entails a substantial upgrade of the CMS tracking system, to cope with much more demanding requirements and to implement additional functionalities. One of the main challenges for the experiments is…

A bright future for microelectronics at CERN

During the 2018 FCC week in Amsterdam, Michael Campbell (EP-ESE) gave a presentation on the “Present and future of microelectronics”. Following an informative review of ASICs used in the LHC run one systems, he tried to distinguish recent trends in…

Designing Utopia – An Ultralow Picoammeter

There are various applications where the output of a sensor is a low current. In some cases like in ionizing radiation measurements, device characterization, leakage current measurements and biosensing instrumentation, the current that has to be…

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