Bandwidths of micro-twisted-pair cables and fusion-spliced SIMM–GRIN fiber

The SLHC is designed to increase the luminosity of the LHC by a factor of 10. In the present ATLAS pixel detector, electrical signals between the pixel modules and the optical modules (opto-boards) are transmitted in ∼1 m of micro-twisted-pair cables. The optical signals between the opto-boards and the off-detector optical modules are transmitted in fiber ribbons. Each fiber link consists of 8 m of rad-hard/low bandwidth SIMM fiber fusion spliced to 70 m of rad-tolerant/medium bandwidth GRIN fiber. We currently transmit optical signals at 80 Mb/s and expect to transmit signals at 1 Gb/s in the SLHC. For the SLHC optical link, we would like to take advantage of some of the design features of the present pixel optical links and the many years of R&D effort and production experience. If the present architecture can transmit signals at the higher speed required by the SLHC, the constraint of requiring no extra service space is automatically satisfied. We have measured the bandwidths of the transmission lines and our preliminary results indicate that the micro-twisted-pair cables can transmit signals up to ∼1 Gb/s and the fusion-spliced fiber ribbon can transmit signals up to ∼2 Gb/s.