A reliability analysis of the BLEAC signal acquisition card for the LHC injectors

As a required part of an Electronics and Mobile Communications Bachelor's degree at the University of Agder, all students have to complete a Bachelor's Thesis within the framework of a course named ELE300, in order to obtain their degree. This Thesis is thus my eort to complete this course. The Bachelor's Thesis was done as part of a Technical Student Programme, which was provided by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, and was hosted at their particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. This Thesis describes the work that was done to obtain the best approach for completing the Bachelor's Thesis within the guidelines of the University of Agder, and the requirements given by CERN as the task giver. The task was to make a number of reliability analyses in order to estimate the overall reliability of a new mission critical beam loss monitoring system which is being developed for the new particle accelerator injector system located in the laboratory's particle accelerator complex. This system is a quite sophisticated electronics acquisition system which incorporates both analogue and digital electronics and works by acquiring, processing and publishing the results from the numerous beam loss monitors located on the accelerators. The task required the use of system reliability theory to calculate the reliability for the electronics on a hardware level, and thus also a decent understanding of the behaviour of analogue circuits. The need for this analysis was based on the criticality of the continuous protection during operation of the LHC injectors.