Upgrade of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter Electronics

The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is the hadronic calorimeter covering the central region of the ATLAS experiment at LHC. The TileCal readout consists of about 10000 channels. The bulk of its upgrade will occur for the High Luminosity LHC phase (phase 2) where the peak luminosity will increase 5x compared to the design luminosity (10^34 cm−2s−1) but with maintained energy (i.e. 7+7 TeV). An additional increase of the average luminosity with a factor of 2 can be achieved by luminosity leveling. This upgrade is expected to happen around 2023. The TileCal upgrade aims at replacing the majority of the on- and off-detector electronics to the extent that all calorimeter signals will be digitized and sent to the off-detector electronics in the counting room. To achieve the required reliability, redundancy has been introduced at different levels. Three different options are presently being investigated for the front-end electronic upgrade. Extensive test beam studies will determine which option will be selected. 10 Gbps optical links are used to read out all digitized data to the counting room while 5 Gbps down-links are used for synchronization, configuration and detector control. For the off-detector electronics a pre-processor (ROD) is being developed, which takes care of the initial trigger processing while temporarily storing the main data flow in pipeline and de-randomizer memories. Field Programmable Gate Arrays are extensively used for the logic functions off- and on-detector. One demonstrator prototype module with the new calorimeter module electronics, but still compatible with the present system, is planned to be inserted in ATLAS this year.