Development of a Detector Control System Chip

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will be updated to the High-Luminosity LHC by 2026. The goal of this update is to achieve higher intensities in the collisions and collect ten times more luminosity than with the LHC. This gives higher statistics to measure with greater precision the parameters of the standard model in particle physics. The ATLAS experiment will receive a completely new inner tracker for operation at the High-Luminosity LHC. This ATLAS ITk detector is a full silicon tracking detector with pixel and strip sensors. A serial power approach is foreseen for the ITk Pixel detector. This reduces the number of services and material, however, has also risks and new challenges. The task of the detector control system (DCS) is to monitor the health of the experiment and control the operation. An integrated circuit was developed for this task. The so-called pixel serial power & protection (PSPP) chip measures the voltage and temperature of a module in the serial power chain. Additionally, it includes a bypass transistor to deactivate a single module if necessary. The bypass is activated automatically in case of over-temperature or over-voltage. This gives full control over each module and allows to recover a serial power chain in case of a faulty module. Based on an existing prototype, new versions of the PSPP were developed for this thesis. They include all required functionalities and can switch a current of 8 A. The developed prototype is functional to a total integrated dose of 800 Mrad, which was tested in X-Ray irradiations. Further, tests were performed to verify the protection against single event upsets causing bit flips in the internal registers. The cross-section of the triplicated registers in the PSPP was measured with a proton test beam and is smaller than 1.7 × 10⁻¹⁷ cm² . The PSPP prototype successfully resisted temperatures between (0 and 60)°C in a 42-day long climate chamber test. No failure was observed. A system test with prototype modules was built at CERN to verify the concept of the serial power chain. This used realistic services and mechanical structures. The PSPP chip was included in the system test and proofed to be very useful during commissioning and debugging. The bypass and its protection function prevented damage to detector modules. The PSPP delivered useful monitoring data to refine the requirements of the serial power chain.