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A: This paper presents the test results of the second prototype of SAMPA, the ASIC designed for the upgrade of read-out front end electronics of the ALICE Time Projection Chamber (TPC) and Muon Chamber (MCH). SAMPA is made in a 130 nm CMOS technology with 1.25 V nominal voltage supply and provides 32 channels, with selectable input polarity, and three possible combinations of shaping time and sensitivity. Each channel consists of a Charge Sensitive Amplifier, a semi-Gaussian shaper and a 10-bit ADC; a Digital Signal Processor provides digital filtering and compression capability. In the second prototype run both full chip and single test blocks were fabricated, allowing block characterization and full system behaviour studies. Experimental results are here presented showing agreement with requirements for both the blocks and the full chip.

This paper describes the design, and experimental characterization of cross inductors in a 0.35µm CMOS technology. The Sonnet tools were used to simulate and evaluate the performance of the new inductor structure, whose core has perpendicular crossed segments at the two highest layers available of the technology. Due to this arrangement, the positive as well as the negative mutual inductance are almost null. To make a fair comparison, the new structure and conventional rectangular inductor were designed to get similar inductance value, and with the same segment width and spacing fixed at 10µm. The proposed cross structure occupied an area of 160x140µm 2 while the square planar inductor presents an area of 180x180µm 2 . Thus, the last one occupies 45% more area than the cross inductor. Some deembedding structures were fabricated and used to subtract the effect of the test-fixture in the on-wafer measurements. The main experimental results are: for cross inductor an inductance value of 2.1nH and Q of 3.3 at 5.2GHz and for the square one an inductance of 1.9nH and Q of 5.5 at 5.5GHz. Although, for similar inductance value, the quality factor of the cross inductor is lower than for the rectangular inductor one, the new cross inductor structure shows to be useful at RF circuits where the inductors are largely used and the most area consuming components.

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