FPGA-based serial links for SuperB: Design Issues Vs. Radiation Tolerance

SuperB is a novel, high-luminosity (10^36cm^-2s^-1), asymmetric e⁺e^- collider to be built at the future Cabibbo Laboratory, in the campus of the University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italy). A detector aimed at studying the B physics will be installed in this facility. High-speed serial links will be used for trigger, control and data read-out. The on-detector ends of the links will have to withstand a hadron fluence of 8·10¹⁰cm^-2 per effective year (10⁷ s). In this work, we focus on the multi-gigabit bidirectional serial link architecture, which we implemented by means of GTP SerDes embedded in Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. We also performed proton irradiation tests of our designs and, with reference to the collected results, we discuss the effectiveness of the radiation mitigation techniques we employed.