R&D Studies of the ATLAS LAr Calorimeter Readout Electronics for super-LHC

The ATLAS Liquid Argon (LAr) calorimeters are high precision, high sensitivity and high granularity detectors designed to provide precision measurements of electrons, photons, jets and missing transverse energy. 180,000 signals are digitized and processed real-time on detector, to provide energy and time deposited in each detector element at every occurrence of the L1-trigger. A luminosity upgrade (x10) of the LHC will occur around 2016. The current readout electronics will have to be upgraded to sustain the higher radiation levels. A completely innovative readout scheme is being developed. The frontend readout will send out data continuously at each bunch crossing through highspeed radiation resistant optical links. The data (100Gbps each board) will be processed real-time with the possibility of implementing trigger algorithms for clusters and electron/photon identification at a much higher granularity than what currently implemented. We present here an overview of the R&D activities and architectural studies the ATLAS LAr collaboration is developing: front-end mixed-signal ASIC design in SiGe, radiation resistance optical-links in SoS, high-speed back-end processing units based on FPGA architectures and power supply distribution schemes.