Design and Verification of Digital Architecture of 65K Pixel Readout Chip for High-Energy Physics

The feasibility to design and implement a front-end ASIC for the upgrade of the VELO detector of LHCb experiment at CERN using IBM’s 130nm standard CMOS process and a standard cell library is studied in this thesis. The proposed architecture is a design to cope with high data rates and continuous data taking. The architecture is designed to operate without any external trigger to record every hit signal the ASIC receives from a sensor chip, and then to transmit the information to the next level of electronics, for example to FPGAs. This thesis focuses on design, implementation and functional verification of the digital electronics of the active pixel area. The area requirements are dictated by the geometry of pixels (55$mu$m x 55$mu$m), power requirements (20W/module) by restricted cooling capabilities of the module consisting of 10 chips and output bandwidth requirements by data rate (< 10 Gbit/s) produced by a particle flux passing through the chip. The design work was carried out using transaction level modeling with SystemVerilog and Open Verification Methodology (OVM) to optimize and verify the architecture before starting RTL-design and synthesis. OVM was also used in functional verification of the RTL-implementation following coverage-driven verification process.