Radial transfer of tracking data with wireless links

Wireless data transfer has revolutionized the consumer mar ket for the last decade giving products equipped with transmitters and receiver for wireless data t ransfer. Wireless technology has fea- tures attractive for data transfer in future tracking detec tors. The removal of wires and connectors for data links is certainly beneficial both for the material b udget and the reliability of the system. One other advantage is the freedom of routing signals which t oday is particularly complicated when bringing the data the first 50 cm outside the tracker. Wit h wireless links intelligence can be built into a tracker by introducing communication betwee n tracking layers within a Region Of Interest which would allow the construction of track primit ives in real time. The wireless signal is transmitted by a passive antenna structure which is a radiat ion hard and much less complex object than an optical link. Due to the requirement of high data rate s in detectors a high bandwidth is required. The frequency band around 60 GHz has large potenti al for use in tracking detectors. The high baseband frequency allow for data transfer of the or der of several Gbit/s, and due to the small wave length in the mm range, only small structures are n eeded. One challenge in applying the technology to trackers is to bring the signal around or th rough boundaries that are not trans- parent to the mm-waves, i.e. silicon detector modules or sup port structures. This article presents a test setup of a 60 GHz data link for radial transmission of mm -waves through an ATLAS de- tector model using a passive repeater structure. We demonst rate that by using a passive repeater structure made of two 60 GHz patch array antennas connected b y a micro strip we can make the signal pass boundaries