Radiation hardness assurance of the CLARO8 front-end chip for the LHCb RICH detector upgrade

The CLARO8 chip has been designed for single-photon counting in the upgraded RICH detector of the LHCb experiment at CERN. The chip has 8 channels with 5 ns peaking time and a recovery time better than 25 ns. Each channel is made of a charge amplifier with 2-bit settable attenuation, plus a comparator with a 6-bit settable threshold, and the configuration register is protected against Single Event Upsets by triple modular redundancy. In order to ensure stable operation of the upgraded RICH detectors over the expected lifetime of the experiment after the upgrade, the performance of the CLARO8 in high radiation fields has been assessed. These chips will be exposed, during the whole upgrade running phase, to a total ionizing dose of 200 krad, a neutron fluence of 3×10$^{12}$ 1 MeV n$_{eq}$ /cm$^2$ and a high energy hadrons fluence of 1.2×10$^{12}$ cm $^{−2}$. Systematic irradiation campaigns have been performed using ions, protons and mixed-field high-energy hadron beams. This paper describes the radiation hardness campaign of the CLARO8 chips and the main results of its extensive characterisation.