Thanks to its compact structure, mechanical endurance, and low bias voltage, the silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) can be used in small-size applications which require reduced power consumption. In ...order to detect the light intensity as low as a single photon, the front-end electronics has to amplify and shape the signal of the photodetector. The low-power design cannot impair the performance of readout electronics or limit the capabilities of the SiPM itself. This paper presents a two-channel integrated circuit (IC) designed in Austria Mikro Systeme CMOS 350-nm technology dedicated for the SiPM-based applications. The input stage is a super-common-gate architecture. Each channel of the IC consists of an amplifier and a peak detector with an offset reduction circuit. The power consumption of the single channel is less than 3 mW from the single voltage supply (3.3 V). Moreover, the number of channels of the IC can be easily increased thanks to small dimensions of the circuit. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the IC including: noise performance with adjustment of the input transistor's size, transient and dc simulations of the amplifier and the peak detector, and the introduction of a simple offset reduction technique for the peak detector. The measurement results obtained with two SiPM detectors are presented.
The study of open charm meson production provides an efficient tool for the investigation of the properties of hot and dense matter formed in nucleus–nucleus collisions. The interpretation of the ...existing di-muon data from the CERN SPS suffers from a lack of knowledge on the mechanism and properties of the open charm particle production. Due to this, the heavy-ion programme of the NA61/SHINE experiment at the CERN SPS has been extended by precise measurements of charm hadrons with short lifetimes. A new Vertex Detector for measurements of the rare processes of open charm production in nucleus–nucleus collisions was designed to meet the challenges of track registration and high resolution in primary and secondary vertex reconstruction. A small-acceptance version of the vertex detector was installed in 2016 and tested with Pb + Pb collisions at 150
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. It was also operating during the physics data taking on Xe + La and Pb + Pb collisions at 150
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conducted in 2017 and 2018. This paper presents the detector design and construction, data calibration, event reconstruction, and analysis procedure.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract The paper presents the D ual U se D riv e r (DUDE) for high speed links, a circuit designed for the Demonstrator ASIC for Radiation-Tolerant Transmitter in 28 nm CMOS (DART28) developed ...under the EP-R&D programme on technologies for future high energy physics experiments. The driver operates at 25.6 Gbps and it allows driving both 100 Ω transmission lines and optical Ring Modulators (RMs) integrated in a photonics integrated circuit (PIC). The driver includes configurable pre-emphasis. The device will allow to demonstrate the feasibility of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical links operating with bandwidths in excess of 100 Gbps per fiber that are capable of sustaining total ionizing radiation doses up to 10 MGy.
Abstract Pioneering physics experiments require increasingly faster data transfers and high-throughput electronics, which drives the research towards a new class of serialisers and optical links. In ...this framework, the DART28, a 100 Gbps radiation tolerant serialiser and driver, has been designed in 28 nm CMOS technology, submitted in April and delivered in August 2023. The development has been coupled with an FPGA based emulation, which provided an early assessment of its behaviour, a scalable system-level demonstrator and an effective evaluation tool for compatible commercial solutions. The challenges faced in this research and the architecture of both the hardware setup and the firmware will be described.
Abstract
True Single-Phase-Clock (TSPC) dynamic logic is widely used in high-speed circuits such as high-speed SERDES (Serializer/Deserializer) and frequency dividers. TSPC flip-flops (FF) are known ...for their high operational speed and low power consumption, compared to static FFs. Due to the relatively high leakage currents in modern CMOS processes, the use of leakage protection techniques of the storage nodes in TSPC must be considered, especially at high radiation doses. In this paper, the limitations originating from Total Ionization Dose (TID)-induced subthreshold leakage currents are analysed and radiation-hardening-by-design (RHBD) circuit techniques are proposed. Additionally, Single Event Upsets (SEU) are investigated by quantifying the critical charge of the leakage protected TSPC FF. The results are compared to both the static and the TSPC FF without leakage mitigation.
Abstract Ongoing developments in the field of radiation-tolerant high-speed transmitters (HSTs) aim at increasing the data rates above 25 Gb/s while increasing total ionizing dose (TID) tolerance ...above 1 Grad. The use of half-rate architectures imposes tight constraints on clock signal quality, in particular its duty-cycle. Radiation degradation of transistors in the clock path causes duty cycle distortion (DCD), affecting the output signal quality of the HST. In this paper, a digitally controlled duty-cycle correction circuit suitable for HST is presented. It compensates for process voltage temperature (PVT) variations as well as radiation-induced duty-cycle distortion of the clock.
A readout circuit dedicated for the detection of the chemiluminescence phenomenon using a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) is presented. During chemiluminescence, light is generated as a result of ...chemical reaction. Chemiluminescence is used in many applications within medicine, chemistry, biology and biotechnology, and is one of the most important sensing techniques in biomedical science and clinical medicine. The front-end electronics consist of a preamplifier and a fast shaper—this produces pulses, the peaking time which is 3.6 ns for a single photon and the FWHM is 3.8 ns. The system has been optimised to measure chemiluminescence—it is sensitive at the level of single photons, it generates a low number of overlapping pulses and is accurate. Two methods of signal detection are analysed and compared: the counting of events and amplitude detection. The relationship between the chemiluminescence light intensity and the concentration of the chemical compound (luminol) is linear in the range of the tested concentrations and has strong linearity parameters and low prediction intervals.
High-fat diet, exposure to saturated fatty acids, or the presence of adipocytes in myoblast microenvironment affects skeletal muscle growth and function. The aim of the present study was to ...investigate the effect of palmitate supplementation on transcriptomic profile of mouse C2C12 myoblasts. Global gene expression was evaluated using whole mouse genome oligonucleotide microarrays, and the results were validated through qPCR. A total of 4047 genes were identified as differentially expressed, including 3492 downregulated and 555 upregulated genes, during a 48-h exposure to palmitate (0.1 mmol/l). Functional classification showed the involvement of these genes in several processes which regulate cell growth. In conclusion, the addition of palmitate modifies the expression of genes associated with (1) myoblast responsiveness to hormones and growth factors, (2) cytokine and growth factor expression, and (3) regulation of cell-cell and cell-matrix communication. Such alterations can affect myoblast growth and differentiation; however, further studies in this field are required.
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EMUNI, FZAB, GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
The LHCb detector will be upgraded to make more efficient use of the available luminosity at the LHC in Run III and extend its potential for discovery. The Ring Imaging Cherenkov detectors are key ...components of the LHCb detector for particle identification. In this paper we describe the setup and the results of tests in a charged particle beam, carried out to assess prototypes of the upgraded opto-electronic chain from the Multi-Anode PMT photosensor to the readout and data acquisition system.
The CLARO is a radiation-hard 8-channel ASIC designed for single photon counting with multi-anode photomultiplier tubes. Each channel outputs a digital pulse when the input signal from the ...photomultiplier crosses a configurable threshold. The fast return to baseline, typically within 25 ns, and below 50 ns in all conditions, allows to count up to 107 hits/s on each channel, with a power consumption of about 1 mW per channel. The ASIC presented here is a much improved version of the first 4-channel prototype. The threshold can be precisely set in a wide range, between 30 ke− (5 fC) and 16 Me− (2.6 pC). The noise of the amplifier with a 10 pF input capacitance is 3.5 ke− (0.6 fC) RMS. All settings are stored in a 128-bit configuration and status register, protected against soft errors with triple modular redundancy. The paper describes the design of the ASIC at transistor-level, and demonstrates its performance on the test bench.