The Versatile Link PLUS project targets the phase II upgrades of the ATLAS and CMS experiments. It will develop a radiation resistant optical link, operating at up to 10 Gb/s in the upstream and up to 5 Gb/s in the downstream directions with a smaller footprint and higher channel count than its predecessor. A low-profile package is being developed that allows volume production at reduced costs, but which nevertheless can be configured to suit the individual channel count needs of different detectors. This paper describes the development strategies and summarizes the status of the feasibility demonstration phase of the project.
Radiation-hard optical links are the backbone of read-out systems in high-energy physics (HEP) experiments at CERN. The optical components must withstand large doses of radiation and strong magnetic fields and provide high data rates. Radiation hardness is one of the requirements that become more demanding with every new generation of HEP experiment. Previous studies have shown that vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, on which the current optical links are based, will not be able to withstand the expected radiation levels in the innermost regions of future HEP experiments. Silicon photonics (SiPh) is currently being investigated as a promising alternative technology to address this challenge. We irradiated SiPh Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs) with different design parameters to evaluate their resistance against ionizing radiation. We confirm that SiPh MZMs with a conventional design do not show a phase shift degradation when exposed to a 20-MeV neutron fluence of 3 • 10 16 n/cm 2. We further demonstrate that custom-designed MZMs with shallow etch optical waveguides and high doping concentrations in their p-n junctions exhibit a strongly improved radiation hardness over devices with a conventional design when irradiated with X-rays. We also found that MZMs withstood higher radiation levels when they were irradiated at a low temperature. In contrast, larger reverse biases during irradiation led to a faster device degradation. Simulations indicate that a pinch-off of holes is responsible for the device degradation. Photodiodes (PDs) were also tested for their radiation hardness as they are needed in silicon photonic transceivers. X-ray irradiation of building-block germanium-silicon PDs showed that they were not significantly affected.
High-speed Mach-Zehnder interferometer silicon modulators were irradiated with neutrons and X-rays in two separate radiation tests. The devices were exposed to a total fluence of neutrons/cm and a total ionizing dose of 1.3 MGy; levels comparable to the worst radiation levels for a tracking detector after 10 years of operation at the High-Luminosity LHC. Our measurements indicate that the devices' performance does not significantly degrade after exposure to nonionizing radiation and begins to be affected by ionizing radiation after a dose of a few hundred kGy; the phase-shift for an applied reverse bias of 1 V is 10% of its preirradiated value after 600 kGy of received ionizing dose.Index Terms-High-luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), optoelectronics, radiation damage, silicon photonics, total ionizing dose (TID).
HL-LHC will require new optical data transmitters that can provide high data rates and be resistant against high levels of radiation. Furthermore, new design paths for future optical readout systems for HL-LHC could be opened if there was a possibility to integrate the optical components with their driving electronics and possibly also the silicon particle sensors themselves. All these functionalities could potentially be combined in the silicon photonics technology which currently receives a lot of attention for conventional optical link systems. Silicon photonic test chips were designed in order to assess the suitability of this technology for deployment in high-energy physics experiments. The chips contain custom-designed Mach-Zehnder modulators, pre-designed "building-block" modulators, photodiodes and various other passive test structures. The simulation and design flow of the custom designed Mach-Zehnder modulators and some first measurement results of the chips are presented.
K: Radiation damage to electronic components; Radiation-hard electronics; Optical detector readout concepts 1Corresponding author.
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