The GBT-SCA, a radiation tolerant ASIC for detector control and monitoring applications in HEP experiments

The future upgrades of the LHC experiments will increase the beam luminosity leading to a corresponding growth of the amounts of data to be treated by the data acquisition systems. To address these needs, the GBT (Giga-Bit Transceiver optical link [1,2]) architecture was developed to provide the simultaneous transfer of readout data, timing and trigger signals as well as slow control and monitoring data. The GBT-SCA ASIC, part of the GBT chip-set, has the purpose to distribute control and monitoring signals to the on-detector front-end electronics and perform monitoring operations of detector environmental parameters. In order to meet the requirements of different front-end ASICs used in the experiments, it provides various user-configurable interfaces capable to perform simultaneous operations. It is designed employing radiation tolerant design techniques to ensure robustness against SEUs and TID radiation effects and is implemented in a commercial 130 nm CMOS technology. This work presents the GBT-SCA architecture, the ASIC interfaces, the data transfer protocol, and its integration with the GBT optical link.