Performance and Comparison of Custom Serial Powering Regulators and Architectures for SLHC Silicon Trackers

Serial powering is an elegant solution to power the SLHC inner trackers with a minimum volume of cables. Previously R&D on the serial powering of silicon strip detector modules had been based on discrete commercial electronics, but with the delivery of the Atlas Binary Chip Next chip in 0.25 micron CMOS technology (ABCN-25) and the Serial Powering Interface chip (SPi), custom elements of shunt regulators and transistors became available. These ASICs can be used to implement three complementary serial powering architectures. The features of these schemes and their performance with 10 and 20 chip ABCN-25 hybrids will be presented.