Radiation-hard Optoelectronics for LHC detector upgrades.

A series of upgrades foreseen for the LHC over the next decade will allow the proton-proton collisions to reach the design center of mass energy of 14 TeV and increase the luminosity to five times (High Luminosity-LHC) the design luminosity by 2027. Radiation-tolerant high-speed optical data transmission links will continue to play an important role in the infrastructure of particle physics experiments over the next decade. A new generation of optoelectronics that meet the increased performance and radiation tolerance limits imposed by the increase in the intensity of the collisions at the interaction points are currently being developed. This thesis focuses on the development of a general purpose bi-directional 5 Gb/s radiation tolerant optical transceiver, the Versatile Transceiver (VTRx), for use by the LHC experiments over the next five years, and on exploring the radiation-tolerance of state-of-the art silicon photonics modulators for HL-LHC data transmission applications. The compliance of the VTRx components with the target radiation tolerance limits were demonstrated in a neutron irradiation carried out on pre-production prototypes of the VTRx. The first limits on the deployment of silicon photonics were identified in a series of particle (neutron,X-ray) irradiations carried out on silicon Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM's) designed by the Université Paris Sud, and a novel electro-optic simulation was developed to model the effects of ionizing radiation on these devices. The simulation was used to demonstrate that adding an additional shallow implantation of highly doped boron to the MZM's is sufficient to produce devices capable of withstanding the harshest radiation environments expected at the HL-LHC.