Commercial Buck Converters and Custom Coil Development for the Atlas Inner Detector Upgrade

A new generation of higher gain commercial buck converters built using advanced short channel CMOS processes has the potential to operate in the Atlas Inner Detector at the Super Large Hadron Collider (sLHC). This approach would inherently be more efficient than the existing practice of locating the power conversion external to the detector. The converters must operate in a large magnetic field and be able to survive both high doses of ionizing radiation and large neutron fluences. The presence of a large magnetic field necessitates the use of an air core inductor which is developed and discussed here. Noise measurements will be made to investigate the effect of the high frequency switching of the buck converter on the sensitive front end electronics. Radiation hardness of selected buck converters and mosfets will also be reported.