Digital Architecture of the New ATLAS Pixel Chip FE-I4

With the high hit rate foreseen for the innermost layers at an upgraded LHC, the current ATLAS Front-End pixel chip FE-I3 would start being inefficient. The main source of inefficiency comes from the copying mechanism of the pixel hits from the pixel array to the end of column buffers. A new ATLAS pixel chip FE-I4 is being developed in a 130 nm technology for use both in the framework of the Insertable B-Layer (IBL) project and for the outer layers of Super-LHC. FE-I4 is 80×336 pixels wide and features a reduced pixel size of 50×250 μm2. In the current design, a new digital architecture is introduced in which hit memories are distributed across the entire chip and the pixels organized in regions. Additional features include neighbor hit checking which allows a timewalk-less hit recording.