A radiation tolerant gigabit serializer for LHC data transmission

In the future LHC experiments, some data acquisition and trigger links will be based on Gbit/s optical fiber networks. In this paper, a configurable radiation tolerant Gbit/s serializer (GOL) is presented that addresses the high-energy physics experiments requirements. The device can operate in four different modes that are a combination of two transmission protocols and two data rates (0.8 Gbit/s and 1.6 Gbit/s). The ASIC may be used as the transmitter in optical links that, otherwise, use only commercial components. The data encoding schemes supported are the CIMT (G-Link) and the 8B/10B (Gbit-Ethernet and Fiber Channel). To guarantee robustness against total dose irradiation effects over the lifetime of the experiments, the IC was fabricated in a standard 0.25 mu m CMOS technology employing radiation tolerant layout practices. The device was exposed to different irradiation sources to test its sensitivity to total dose effects and to single effects upsets. For this tests, a comparison is established with a commercial serializer. (12 refs).