Integrated circuits for particle physics experiments

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) will be operational in the year 2005. The LHC will host four detectors, ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb. They each will have tens of millions of sensor channels and will be the "electronic eyes" looking at the intersection regions where collisions of protons of 7 TeV energy will take place at a frequency of 40 MHz, each producing a spray of several thousand particles. As the newly created particles fly away from the collision point, they traverse several detector layers: the tracker, the calorimeter and finally the muon detector. The authors discuss the electronics required for such detectors in high-energy physics experiments. They conclude that modern commercial deep submicron CMOS technology offers the required density and performance for the electronics, and provides through special layout techniques the radiation tolerance essential for the experiments at LHC.