Upgrading the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter electronics

The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is the hadronic calorimeter covering the most central region of the ATLAS experiment at LHC. The TileCal readout consists of about 10000 channels. The main upgrade will occur for the High Luminosity LHC phase (phase 2) which is scheduled around 2022. The upgrade aims at replacing the majority of the on- and off- detector electronics so that all calorimeter signals are directly digitized and sent to the off-detector electronics in the counting room. An ambitious upgrade development program is pursued studying different electronics options. Three different options are presently being investigated for the front-end electronic upgrade. Which one to use will be decided after extensive test beam studies. High speed optical links are used to read out all digitized data to the counting room. For the off-detector electronics a new back-end architecture is being developed, including the initial trigger processing and pipeline memories. A demonstrator prototype read-out for a slice of the calorimeter with most of the new electronics, but also compatible with the present system, is planned to be inserted in ATLAS already in mid 2014 (at the end of the phase 0 upgrade).